"George Orwell described what was going on here in his classic and all too prescient essay, "Politics and the English Language." In it, he noted:
'In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. ... Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless 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. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.'
Now millions of innocent lives are destroyed in the womb, even before they see their first light of day, and this is called abortion rights."
Spot on. Similarly "affordable healthcare" is really "unaffordable healthcare" or not healthcare at all, "equality" means some are more equal to redress supposed inequality, and so on and so on. It is definitely Orwell's barnyard out there and getting worse all the time.
Meaningful language is one of the first steps to getting a handle on our situation. It's time to clean out the Newspeaks and send a lot of Plainspeaks to D.C. and to our state capitals if we want to get a handle on our huge problems.
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