Category: Language

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GOP Speak: You can talk about it, just don’t mention it

Almost 75 years after it was published, George Orwell’s novel 1984 has nothing on today’s Republican Party when it comes to language.  The novel features such ideological practices as “newspeak” and “doublethink” that conform language to the needs of a society’s authoritarian leadership to maintain control of its population.  Newspeak is a minimalist language designed to make the utterance of heretical thoughts–those that challenge central authority–impossible.   Doublethink refers to the ability to believe and say that black is white, in contradiction of plain facts, in order to uphold the regime.

Does any of this sound familiar today?  Since the rise of “Trumpism” in the Republican Party, we have seen the explosion not only of blatant lies, but also the creation of “alternative” facts to support law-free rule.  We have seen “Don’t say gay” restrictions for the early grades of schools in Florida, and the deletion of critical race theory from curriculums ranging up to college level.  Lately we’ve seen an apparently new development in the distortion of language in the service of ideological manipulation:  the notion that one can speak of things without mentioning what they are about.

This rang a bell for me, one that rings back half a century in my work life and that I have always since associated with the most destructive elements of conservative politics in the U.S.  Perhaps it is no small coincidence that Orwell’s book was published on my mother’s birthday in the year that I was born. Continue reading “GOP Speak: You can talk about it, just don’t mention it”

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Language Habits III (A series of occasional rants)

Language evolves over time.  It can also be trendy.  Here’s the difference: Water carves mountains out of stone over millennia.  Many generations pass by the same local mountain, noticing none of these tiny developments.  This is a mountain evolving.

Water carves out snow lickety split.   Relative to the evolution of language, this is more like word or phrase trendiness.  It comes and goes.  And my gripe is with much of this trendiness.  So here goes Round III. Continue reading “Language Habits III (A series of occasional rants)”

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Language Habits II (A Series of Occasional Rants)

Alright, I am going to make a point of this one last time.  Then I am going to bury my revered high school Latin textbook in the backyard, in the sacred ground deep beneath my cat’s ashes.  DATA IS PLURAL!

And that sentence is the only way to say correctly “Data is”!

My former colleagues in the press seem to have long ago given up on the correct usage of “data.”  Even television doctors commenting on the pandemic data, people trained in a science that has long drawn heavily on Latin words and roots, routinely mess up the use of “data.”  You know what the singular word for “data” is?  It is datum which, I agree, does not roll easily off the tongue.  But we don’t need a single datum.  We need an “are.”

So goodbye to “Data are . . .”  RIP with the language of the ancients–and my beloved cat. Continue reading “Language Habits II (A Series of Occasional Rants)”

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Will Freedom Kill Liberty?

You may recall the now-iconic phrase that emerged during the Tea Party rise in our national politics around the 2010 elections:  “Take your government hands off my Medicare!”   Now there was a valid point to it–Republicans in Congress were threatening to pass a budget that would end “Medicare as we know it.”

But the directive also betrayed a deep confusion about the role of the national government in citizens’ lives, suggesting that a major social safety net program was not a program of government.  Indeed, political science research published in 2010 found that 40 percent of Medicare recipients surveyed denied that they had ever benefitted from a government social program.

Laughable as this level of civic ignorance struck many of us at the time, in fact it poses a significant threat to the stability and security of American society.  If citizens badly misunderstand their basic relationships with government, then they are more vulnerable to the distortions and appeals of demagogues. Continue reading “Will Freedom Kill Liberty?”

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A Note on Language and Politics

Many of us may recall a subtle shift in political language that began during the last decade, maybe longer ago now.  Prominent members of the Republican Party began to refer to the opposing party as the “Democrat” Party.  We had all grown up knowing it as the “Democratic” party, and its candidates as the “Democratic” candidates.  Now, to the GOP, they are the “Democrat” candidates . . . or it is the “Democrat” position, and etc.  From Republican mouths, the word often sounds as if an epithet is being spit out.  For them, it has come to be a term of derision if not of disgust, much more (and less) than the name of an opposition party.  No matter: some even in the mainstream media appear to have adopted the term. Continue reading “A Note on Language and Politics”

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Language Habits (A Series of Occasional Rants)

Words, and the ways people use them, have always held a special fascination for me.  Words express, inform, engage, motivate, heal and harm.  They can dismantle selves as well as they can inspire movements.  They enrich with metaphor and catch us up with irony.  They can equally be constructed into forms of art and be debased by misuse.  Here I offer a few ideas about the latter dichotomy, with a bit of a rant about some of the more annoying uses of language today. Continue reading “Language Habits (A Series of Occasional Rants)”

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