An appropriate vocabulary and language of the commons are essential for the the health of the surviving commons. At present the dominant paradigm is so pervasive, that the language of property is used to describe and regulate the commons. In many cases, there is no vocabulary to describe and therefore the language of property is imported and deployed. Even those with legitimate constitutional backing term restoration of commons as encroachment or, in the case of MST Brazil, as ‘invasions’. These should instead be seen and named as land restoration and liberation. It is only then that the legitimacy of restoring the commons for commoners is affirmed with the empowering knowledge of legitimacy. This is the required ‘vocabulary of commoning’, needed for the active process of returning the resources to the commons and the commons to the community of commoners. The present crisis offers an opportunity for a radical shift, if we can move beyond the paralysis of fear and a mindset firmly stuck in an economy of scarcity and stratification—resulting in the hoarding of everything from food to knowledge, of rats eating grain in government godowns when over half the population goes hungry and denial is based on caste, gender, language or religion. They are incongruous in the present era. These are consequences of fear, privatisation and the fencing of the commons—whether by executive fiat, parliamentary expropriation, ‘development’ imperatives or by the very character of the Indian state which, as an institution of property, only exists to further property interests. These are no longer necessary in an era of abundant resources, where a new normal is eminently possible— of cooperation of collectives engendered by the commons approach of ‘the earth has enough for everyone’s needs’. The solution lies not within the present system of privatisation nor in tinkering and inconsequential ‘reforms’, but in a new paradigm, a language of the commons.