In current (February 2024) Left discourse, a popular utterance, rising into the air amid waving banners, is, “Smash Zionism!” But an odd thing about the utterers marching with their flags is that their word smash, the verb that says what they think they mean, is much older than they know. I first encountered it myself more than fifty years ago, on a college campus where some very old professors from the days of CPUSA had organized a congregation of the Progressive Labor Party and were using it to teach the young the hymns of their youth. Just then they were abstractly exhorting us all to smash racism, but you can imagine Hegel being equally abstract long before that time and place — say, silently in 1927, before the screen in a German movie theater.

In any case, the marchers don’t seem to be any closer to their arrival now than they were then. Their metaphor remains in the future tense. It seems to want to be in the imperative mode there, but over the bullhorns it sounds more like a jussive: “You guys! Let’s smash!”

And likewise with the yo ho ho Treasure Island jollity of “Hands off Gaza.” When, o human reader, was the last time you yourself ever said “Hands off”? Can you even imagine how your voice would sound to yourself in its moment of utterance? It could be only one part of a uniform roar, with all the separate words blurred by the loud.

But here’s a literary history that may help with the speech problem.  Its data were compiled many decades ago, words and wardrobe and all. Its original beneficiary, Nabokov’s exiled T. P. Pnin, is here to be discovered before another movie screen — this one, however, in an American classroom far from the home that he will never see again.

You can fill in the part after the hyphen yourself. Professor Pnin, the last speaker of his lost language, was weeping for Ruki proch, which translates to “Hands off.” It isn’t a phrase he was ever taught to understand. He is one of those on whose language hands were laid.

Under the same hands today, the hand metaphor is no longer a matter of language but a body function. Its hymnody isn’t composed for words on a banner but for an electronic simulation of horned bulls. The bulls bellow by the codes of machine learning. Horns held in their still human hands, they now rush through the chutes they have built for themselves to the abattoirs.

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A history of my 1970s experience with smash is available at https://jonathanmorse.blog/2014/01/08/political-history-book-song-anecdote/