Language Abuse

Everything turns to shit. Rapidly.

The Americans have done it again: they’ve ruined the language.

Alright, alright, not all Americans are responsible this time.

Instead, it’s the ways that modern Republicans have savaged political English, slapping words with exact, precise definitions onto a loose agglomeration of concepts wily-nily [sic] until they’re unrecognizable distortions, sometimes even inversions. This isn’t like calling a crow a raven. Instead, it’s more like if you were to point at an elephant and call it a chihuahua. These are not understandable near misses.

This is a problem because a shared political reality requires a shared political language to describe concepts. Thinkers from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt and George Orwell understood that words matter and that the lexicon we use to describe our social world directly influences our perceptions of it.

Orwell, who is quoted endlessly for 1984, wrote a somewhat less famous essay called “Politics and the English Language,” in which he decried how linguistic contortions could excuse even the most egregious abuses. “Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification."

[The Garden of Forking Paths]