For a lifetime, language has been important to me. I remember, in adolescence, trying to figure out what could be my life’s work. At one stage, I used to draft articles and submit them to my father for inspection and evaluation.
In the guise of a sportswriter, I wrote an account of a Red Sox game. I judged it a good piece of work but my father, a newspaperman of some eminence, after perusing that effort pointed out that I had not mentioned the final score.
That piece did not suggest I would become a second Red Smith or Roger Angell.
On another occasion, I wrote a review of a play I had seen. That, too, proved flawed, as my father had to point out. It did not look as if I would follow in the steps of Elliot Norton, the outstanding drama critic who wrote then for the Boston Post, as did my father.
Despite these adolescent fumbles, I continued to cultivate a taste for language. It was important for me to use words correctly and to write clearly and effectively. Becoming editor of The Walrus, my high school newspaper, sharpened my taste for words. So did my work on The Arrow, our yearbook, although my copy of this latter publication reveals clichés galore.
A current preoccupation of mine is the use of language by members of our federal government. I have been amazed and often distressed by the way words are manipulated to achieve dubious political results. To make matters worse, the American public seems altogether too little aware of this twisting of language designed to cover up reality.
The well known journalist Katrina Vanden Heuvel showed herself both eloquent and passionate about this subject in a talk I heard her give this spring. She began by saying of the current leadership in Washington: “This administration has reached, not just for its guns, but its dictionary.”
Notice, for example, the way advocates for radical changes in Social Security stopped speaking of “private accounts.” The new name, and one that shortly became politically correct, at least for the advocates, is “personal accounts.” The change may seem small enough to be inconsequential but it made the privatization of the system seem much more acceptable.
Another term applied to the same radical plan to change Social Security is “ownership society.” Again, it serves as a euphemism for “privatization,” a word that more honestly describes what is being proposed. But privatization must be avoided under threat of older Americans and others rising up in protest against the mangling of Social Security.
The White House has also used the term “compassion agenda” for a set of themes that justify pulling back on federal assistance to elder citizens. Describing these themes political scientist Robert Binstock writes: “Elders should be productive, assume individual responsibility, and become part of the ‘ownership society’ rather than relay on government programs.”
And what could be more humanistic than the phrase for an educational program that features testing? “No child left behind” sounds like an ideal that every American would wish to embrace. Let’s be inclusive and give all our children the advantages of a fine education.
A program to allow the cutting of trees in the nation’s forest carries the slogan “Clean skies, healthy forests.” This phrase has provoked critical wags to propose an alternative title: “No tree left behind.”
The Patriot Act is another specious title that makes it look as if the invasion of the privacy of American citizens is altogether justified by the virtue of patriotism.
Then, to justify a war that is dubious at best, the public has been served from a whole menu of evasive terms. “Regime change” sounds a whole lot better than “invasion.” And “collateral civilian casualties” goes down much more smoothly than “killing innocent people.” “Prisoners” have become “detainees.”
As to forms of torture, “sleep adjustment” becomes the substitute for sleep deprivation, whereby prisoners are kept awake by force, the better to wring information out of them.
The latest twist in language comes, not from the adminstration itself, but from the commander at Guantanamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris. He has called the suicide of three prisoners an act of “asymmetric warfare waged against us.”
Besides driving me to my dictionary, the admiral has won my admiration for bravado. It takes chutzpah to imagine that people who have been imprisoned for four years under grueling conditions, without being charged with any crime, are actually perpetrating an act of aggression against us by hanging themselves.
The British author George Orwell sounded the alert about this kind of language. He pointed out what a threat it mounts to democratic freedoms. “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought,” he once wrote.
The corruption of language, Orwell believed, leads to the loss of liberty. When words are twisted like pretzels into meaning what manipulators want them to mean, then we are all in trouble.
Richard Griffin