Unspeak

The philosopher’s name was Confucius, and he was referring to a phenomenon that is all around us today. He was talking about Unspeak.
Let’s see how it works. What do the phrases ‘pro-choice’, ‘tax relief’, and ‘Friends of the Earth’ have in common? They are all names that also contain political arguments, in a way that alternative names – say, ‘opposed to the criminalisation of abortion’, ‘tax reduction’, or ‘a group of environmental campaigners’ – do not.
Campaigners against abortion had from the early 1970s described their position as defending a ‘right to life’. The opposing camp, previously known as ‘pro-abortionists’, then renamed their position ‘pro-choice’, rhetorically softening what they favoured. Defending a woman’s ‘right to choose’ whether to have a baby or not, the slogan ‘pro-choice’ appealed to an apparently inviolable concept of individual responsibility. It sought to cast adversaries as ‘anti-choice’: as interfering, patriarchal dictators. However, the phrase also carried unfortunate associations with the consumerist ideal of ‘choice’, as though choosing cereals in a supermarket were an appropriate model for ethics

He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.84

Another realm in which ‘the judicious study of discernible reality’ was held in contempt, for example, was that of science.

‘to dwell on the wickedness of that man who endeavours to wrest to his own purposes not only the effect of things, but also the meaning of words, in order both to do as he pleases, and to call what he does by whatever name he likes.’

[I]t will be desirable to invalidate the definition of the adversaries; but that will be invalidated if it be proved to be false. This proof must be deduced from the belief of men concerning it, when we consider in what manner and under what circumstances men are accustomed to use that expression in their ordinary writing or talking.

People are forever quoting Talleyrand’s remark that language is only there in order to hide the thoughts of the diplomat (or for that matter of any other shrewd and dubious person). But in fact the very opposite is true. Whatever it is that people are determined to hide, be it only from others, or from themselves, even things they carry around unconsciously – language reveals all.

In sealing up their worldviews in little shells of Unspeak, politicians cannot help but reveal a lot about what they really mean, to anyone who listens closely enough.

propagandistic speech can never be totally efficient. Language will not serve just one master

Even the most brutal kind of euphemism teaches us valuable things about the mindset of the people who employ it

It represents an attempt to say something without saying it, without getting into an argument and so having to justify itself