: Wrong candidates?…The new doublespeak…
Geoffrey Nunberg considers what it means for language to be Orwellian in an age that has embraced the critical examination of political language that George Orwell encouraged:
For Orwell, the success of political jargon and euphemism required an uncritical or even unthinking audience: a “reduced state of consciousness,” as he put it, was “favorable to political conformity.” As things turned out, though, the political manipulation of language seems to thrive on the critical skepticism that Orwell encouraged.
In fact, there has never been an age that was so well-schooled in the perils of deceptive language or in decoding political and commercial messages, as seen in the official canonization of Orwell himself. Thanks to the schools, “1984″ is probably the best-selling political novel of modern times (current Amazon sales rank: No. 93), and “Politics and the English Language” is the most widely read essay about the English language and very likely in it as well.
But as advertisers have known for a long time, no audience is easier to beguile than one that is smugly confident of its own sophistication. The word “Orwellian” contributes to that impression. Like “propaganda,” it implies an aesthetic judgment more than a moral one. Calling an expression Orwellian means not that it’s deceptive but that it’s crudely deceptive.
Today, the real damage isn’t done by the euphemisms and circumlocutions that we’re likely to describe as Orwellian. “Ethnic cleansing,” “revenue enhancement,” “voluntary regulation,” “tree-density reduction,” “faith-based initiatives,” “extra affirmative action,” “single-payer plans” — these terms may be oblique, but at least they wear their obliquity on their sleeves.
Rather, the words that do the most political work are simple ones — “jobs and growth,” “family values” and “color-blind” not to mention “life” and “choice.” But concrete words like these are the hardest ones to see through. They’re opaque when you hold them up to the light.
I would add that for our culture such terms as “family values” also connote common sense, as if we all know and agree upon what the essential definitions and cultural meanings of these terms are. In a way, however, such “concrete” terms are far more fuzzy than crudely deceptive, and readily transparent, political euphemisms. Conservatives and liberals alike know that “tree-density reduction” means cutting trees. But the compound noun “family values” identifies far different things for conservatives than it does for liberals.
