A hill to die on: "conspiracy" is not the same as "conspiracy theory"

Many will have Noticed the tendency now being pushed to conflate "conspiracy theory", i.e., a claim that a conspiracy existed, with the term "conspiracy" itself. As such claims tend to be unevidenced, the term has further taken on a sense of "unproven allegation" and indeed "falsehood" itself.

This makes it very difficult to talk about actual existing covert collusion.

Here's an example of a programmer (no less):

it's weird that there is this conspiracy that big tech companies use h-1b visa employees to avoid hiring americans

I don't choose this example to make any kind of political point either way, rather to show that it is impeding topical political discourse in the real world.

As another recent example, of the further blurring of the received meaning of the word, I saw a clip of the singer Cher having to disambiguate this during a recent interview, where the interviewer said "conspiracy" and Cher asked "by 'conspiracy' do you mean 'something that is not true'?". Hopeless.

How are people supposed to talk about unlawful cooperation, particular when it's unproven? The UK has just finished hearings at a public inquiry about the Post Office scandal. The evidence suggests it's worth the police investigating whether there was indeed a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, and that phrase is literally the name of the corresponding criminal offence. Adhere to the Principle of Fair Labelling demands that we neither exaggerate nor diminish an offender's guilt, but this is barely possible when there is an organic movement to smudge the lexical distinction between alleged and actual misconduct.

As I understand it, the term "conspiracy theory" was popularised by the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination of President Kennedy, to cover the unevidenced scenarios where Lee Harvey Oswald had coordinated his activities with his (well-evidenced) group of dodgy associates. Google Ngram search shows its growth since that time:

Broader linguistic context

While obviously there is a *political* context to attempts to conflate the word for "two or more people are allegedly colluding about some future act" with "unproven claim" and "falsehood", to the detriment of honest claims of such collusion, there is also a *linguistic* context. It's part of a broader pattern in the way the meaning of words changes (or "is changed") in English.

In some languages, nouns can be added together consecutively to make a new compound word, e.g., "race" + "course" making "racecourse", "pen" and "name" making "penname". Later in time, one of the two constituent words may come to be dropped, without a change in the meaning.

A good example is the word "microwave". As well as meaning a variety of electromagnetic radtio, it can now mean a type of oven. This is because of the phrase "microwave oven". In English and German and many other languages, you can prefix nouns with other nouns to make a word meaning a more specific type of the latter noun. So a "microwave oven" is type of oven, not a type of electromagnetic radiation. For some people, "email" now also means "email address" as well as what it used exclusively to mean. Similarly people might way "my Instagram" for "my Instagram page".

This can cause genuine misunderstanding. In 1998 I was on a visit to Texas and my roommate asked "do you have a faculty?". What he meant was "do you have a faculty *member* [travelling with you]?", whereas I'd taken him to mean "at what faculty are you studying?". Possibly the notion of dropping the latter element of these two-noun phrases if more of a "thing" in America.

This provides some linguistic cover (крыша?) for the elision of "conspiracy theory" with "conspiracy" - but of course I'm not really providing evidence ...

Addendum

Many years ago, the Guido Fawkes blog stated something like "The Global Zionist Conspiracy is strongly supported here at Guido Fawkes". That was clearly intended at the time as being a edgy backhanded compliment relying on the non-existence of such a conspiracy, but could now be mistaken for *promotion* of the idea that the conspiracy theory is *true*.