Rectify the names.
Asked what he would do first if given a government, Confucius said he would make the words correct — because if language is disordered, nothing that follows from it can be right, and the people will not know where to put their hands and feet. It is a claim that political disorder begins as a vocabulary problem.
Zhengming, the rectification of names, appears in Analects 13.3, where Zilu asks what Confucius would do first if given charge of a state and gets an answer he plainly finds disappointing. The chain runs: if names are not correct, speech does not accord with things; if speech does not accord, affairs are not completed; if affairs are not completed, ritual and music do not flourish; if they do not flourish, punishments miss their mark; and if punishments miss, the people have nowhere to put their hands and feet. The concrete sense is that a ruler should be a ruler, a father a father, a son a son — that titles carry obligations, and that calling someone a king who does not behave as one corrupts everything downstream. It is a theory that political disorder begins as a linguistic problem, and it has been picked up in the twentieth century by people arguing about propaganda and euphemism who had never read the rest of the book.
The same ground, other faiths
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