51 Idiosyncratic Language

There is another common practice which is almost directly opposed to the false kind of control of meaning represented by the fallacy of etymology. This is the sort of paradoxical talk that attempts to sound profound: "The seeming real is the only illusion." It consists in a sort of personal or private charging of words with meanings different from, and sometimes opposite to, the usual range of the words in their conventional contexts. The present time seems peculiarly susceptible to this sort of perversion of the language. Orwell brilliantly characterized the phenomenon in his 1984 ("War is Peace"). 0«O 'XA^A

It seems particularly hard to describe just what takes place in the cases we have collected. New ideologies -- religious, political, philosophical -- arise today in a ferment. It is not surprising that language evolved for the needs of past generations is inadequate to express all the new concepts that people wish to talk about. They must stretch old words to radically new meanings or invent barbarous neologisms. They do both, of course, and sometimes with unhappy results. The situation favors some persons and groups who deliberately exploit linguistic confusion. Errors in judgment are described as "treason," conservative statesmen called "fascists," capitalists called "bourgeois imperialistic beasts." Such perversion of language also goes hand in hand with a cynical employment of the emotive power of words (see #13).

EXAMPLE

The "National Museum" -- a private enterprise on the site of the Battle of Bull Run. The "National Socialist rule of law" -- a denial of an independent judiciary, equality before the law, certainty of law, habeas corpus and other procedural safeguards: in short, a rejection of everything traditionally associated with the term "rule of law." A "People's Democracy" -- a monolithic totalitarian system suppressing free expression of the popular will in control of government.