The meaning of the words: Orwell, Didion, Trump and the death of language

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The death of Joan Didion, the deepest essay on language since George Orwell, came at a time when one of her most brilliant observations – those words have meaning and consequences – were ignored more than ever.

There is no other meaningless word than social media, where, for example, a respondent to a story on Breitbart’s “news portal” could without consequence accuse Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of America’s most notorious public servants, of having “assisted its bioweapon engineer (Covid-19)” and then claimed, in appropriate wheel syntax, that Fauci “financially derived from it, was now dictates the social and economic aspects of the people. [and] is more than despicable. This little man has so much unelected power to be. ”

In fact, none of these things did Fauci, or, as other conspiracy theorists claim, was there a basement under a pizza parlor in Washington where politicians could drink the blood of children, a proposal that would be obvious nonsense to anyone who has actually tasted a sufficient amount of real blood.

RELATIONSHIP: Democracy vs. fascism: What do those words mean – and do they describe the moment?

“We welcome thoughtful responses and input,” Breitbart’s editors said at the top of their comments section. “Comments that are personally identifiable, harassing, or other violations will be removed.”

“Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic reasons: it is not simply because of its bad influence or that of the individual writer,” Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay ” Politics and the English Language. “But, he continued,

an effect can cause, reinforce the original cause and bring the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A person may drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail more because he is drinking. This is rather the same thing that happens in English. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are stupid, but the sloppiness of our language makes it easier for us to have stupid thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.

No one has contributed more to this than the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, whose every statement seems to have taken the wing from the truth. The Washington Post fact checker in Jan. 21, 2021, the day after his presidency, reported that Trump amassed 30,573 verifiable untruths during his presidency, with an average of approximately 21 false claims in a day.

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But of course the twice-impeached ex-president is not alone. Too many politicians are accusing Democrats of wanting to get criminals out of the streets. So many others accuse Republicans of fascism, though the frightening rhetoric seems to go to Republicans. It was Newt Gingrich who, from the time he was elected to the House of Representatives, called Texas Democrat Jim Wright’s relatively dull speakership “the most corrupt in history” when it wasn’t such a thing. He went on to evade alleged corruption in the Barack Obama administration without even a single accusation that occurred during the eight years of Obama’s leadership.

The result of the tsunami of lies is not just a fierce and deceptive defense of an administration that began in 2016 and ended in 2020 and turned disasters into success with nothing but words. It is to lower the language to lose its meaning. If the mind can damage language, Orwell says, language can also damage the mind. There seems to be no better example of that phrase than the Trump administration. It’s possible the man sat in his castle in Mar-a-Lago and say he won the 2020 presidential race when he beat it by 7 million votes, a defeat proven in 61 courts of law, and have 30 million weird people believe in him.

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” Orwell wrote:

Things like the resumption of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the drop of atomic bombs on Japan, can really be defended, but only through arguments that are too brutal for most people. to face, and not worth it. the alleged purpose of political parties. So political language should be more composed of euphemism, questioning and thin cloudy ambiguity. Defenseless villages were bombed from the air, the inhabitants were driven into the countryside, cattle were fired upon by machine guns, huts were burned by flaming bullets: this was called pacification. Millions of farmers were robbed of their farms and sent to the roads with nothing more than they could carry: this was called population migration or border correction. People were imprisoned for many years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in wood camps in the Arctic: this was called the elimination of unreliable elements. Such a phrase is necessary if one wants to name things without calling the mind pictures of them.

That’s the kind of euphemism written by Washington Post correspondent Craig Whitlock in “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War,” which came from secret Pentagon documents and published in August, documenting 20 years of “euphemisms” that successive U.S. governments have used to gull their citizens. That’s the kind of euphemism used in Iraq by the three presidents. The “renditions” have stopped, but there is still “collateral damage” and the troops are still “pulling” rather than retreating, as when they fled recently to Afghanistan. The missile strike that killed a family of 10 in Kabul, including seven children, “was taken in the earnest belief that it would avert an imminent threat to our forces and the evacuees at the airport, but it was a mistake. “

“I do not here consider the literary use of language, but language only as an instrument of expression and not for concealment or suppression of thought,” Orwell wrote. “Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how do you fight against Fascism? One doesn’t have to swallow nonsense like this, but one must recognize that the current political turmoil is connected to the decay of language, and probably one can bring some improvement by starting at the verbal end. ”

Of course, the latest linguistic expert is Jared Schmeck, a father in Oregon who on a Christmas call for his children with the president of the United States, ended the conversation with “Merry Christmas” and the the word “Let’s go Brandon,” which has become a right-wing euphemism for “Fuck Joe Biden.” Schmeck is now hurting because he has received threatening messages from disgruntled people. His rights to free speech, he said, allow him to tell the president of the United States to kick himself. That he used one of the most offensive insults in the English language to exchange Christmas greetings with the country’s highest elected official didn’t even strike him as inappropriate.

Read more about language decay and its effects on politics:

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