Politics and Language

"Nominally, the sponsor of No. 07-0032 is Californians for Equal Representation. But that’s just a letterhead—there’s no such organization. Its address is the office suite of Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk, the law firm for the California Republican Party, and its covering letter is signed by Thomas W. Hiltachk, the firm’s managing partner and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s personal lawyer for election matters. Hiltachk and his firm have been involved in many well-financed ballot initiatives before, including the recall that put Arnold in Sacramento. They specialize in initiatives that are the opposite of what they sound like—the Fair Pay Workplace Flexibility Act of 2006, for example. It would have raised the state minimum wage slightly—by a lesser amount than it has since been raised—and, in the fine print, would have made it impossible ever to raise it again except by a two-thirds vote in both houses of the legislature, while, for good measure, eliminating overtime for millions of workers."

Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker, August 6, 2007.

From George Orwell's Politics and the English Language

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad
way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument
which we shape for our own purposes. Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this
or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it
easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so
that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

From Donald Barthelme's Not-Knowing

“The question is, what is the complicity of language in the massive crimes of Fascism, Stalinism, or (by implication) our own policies in Vietnam? In the control of societies by the powerful and their busy functionaries? If their abominations are in some sense facilitated by, made possible by, language, to what degree is the language ruinously contaminated (considerations also raised by George Steiner in his well-known essay ‘The Hollow Miracle’ and, much earlier, by George Orwell)? I am sketching here, inadequately, a fairly complex argument; …but the problems command the greatest respect. Again, we have language suspicious of its own behavior; although this suspicion is not different in kind from Hemingway’s noticing, early in the century, that words like honor, glory, and country were perjured, bought, the skepticism is far deeper now, as informed as well by the investigations of linguistic philosophers, structuralists, semioticians. … Quickly now, quickly – when you hear the phrase ‘our vital interests’ do you stop to wonder whether you were invited to the den, Zen, Klan, or coven meeting at which these were defined? Did you speak?”