Humpty Dumpty 0
famously said, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”
He had nothing on the Current Federal Administration.
When is an escalation not an escalation.
When it’s a surge.
When is a surge not a surge. When it’s an augmentation (funny, I get emails about augmentation all the time).
The Bush administration has long understood the importance of word play, which is why, among many examples, it has long sought to redefine the privatization of Social Security as a push for “personal accounts†(because the word personal has a more positive connotation). Similarly, the urge to push the friendlier word surge (a burst of electrical power) stemmed from a war council desire to cushion the blow of a new troop hike.
Orwell, the British journalist/commentator/novelist, understood this impulse more than six decades ago. In his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,†he argued that because our leaders often have little interest in candor, “political language has to consist largely of euphemism.†He also wrote: “Politics otself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred….When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.â€
When out and out lies won’t work, obsfuscate.
