George Orwell warned us, in his “
Politics and the English Language,” as well as in his more famous work,
Ninteen Eighty-Four,
against the dangers of dressing up our language in euphemism and cluttering it
with cliche rather than simply saying what we mean.
by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary
trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to
think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that
the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive
concern of professional writers”
(source).
Last week, we learned that Mitt Romney had “suspended” his campain, when what
he’d really done was ended it. Suspending implies at least the possibility
of some future resuming, but I doubt Mitt will be jumping back into the
fray before the general election.
Of course, the Bush-Cheney era is filled with too many examples to mention.
Feel free to add your favorites in the comments, I’ll only list a few that
come immediately to mind, most having to do with administration efforts to spin
the Iraq War. Instead of what any reasonable person would call
torture, we have “heavy interrogation.” All wars have prisoners of war, but
our conflict, in a clever effort to deny them the legal protections of POWs,
instead has “enemy combatants” who are caged in “detention centers” rather
than prison camps. The policy of moving said prisoners from one country to
another, often in yet another effort to shirk legal protections from torture
and other due process concerns, is dubbed “extra rendition,” which makes sound
like some cooking technique.
What shocks me is not that politicians spin things or that criminals like to
invent neutered terms to hide their crimes. What I find shocking is that
such terms are repeated with so little scrutiny. Plain speaking is
important. In fact, it’s too important to leave to professional journalists
and, even worse, the non-journalists who endlessly analyze and comment on
political events of the day while, at the very same time, avoiding any real
analysis of them. The exact reason why such pain speaking is important I’ll
leave to Orwell, as I’ll never match his eloquence:
orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a
stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political
language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from
Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder
respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind” (source).