The corruption of language

Orwell argued famously that political corruption leads to language corruption, which leads to further political corruption.

Roy Peter Clark, Murder Your Darlings

When people in power stumble when trying to define what a woman is, when the U.S.-Mexico border is called secure while people flood across it by the millions and when an unarmed riot at the U.S. Capitol is termed an insurrection, it is clear that both the language and the political system in America are corrupt. Those most likely to use the term misinformation seem to be the ones most likely to spread it.

Roy Peter Clark in his 2020 book Murder Your Darlings points out that even the word propaganda has been corrupted, although not recently. The term once had a positive spin. It comes from the word propagate and was used by the Roman Catholic Church to describe what would later be called evangelism or "spreading the gospel."

S.I. Hayakawa

According to S.I. Hayakawa, it was the Nazis — talk about political corruption — who corrupted the word, and as Clark puts it, "we lost a name for good propaganda." Good propaganda? Nowadays that sounds like a contradiction in terms. Yet broadly interpreted, any language used to convince anybody of anything is propaganda. This includes public relations campaigns, commercial advertising and even a teenager trying to borrow a parent's car. This blog, by that loose standard, is propaganda whenever I suggest that certain books are worth reading and others not so much.

All propaganda uses the language and in some cases exaggerates the language. For example, a book called a "best seller" may actually have not climbed very high at all on the best-seller list. But political corruption goes further and corrupts the language, making it unclear what formerly clear words mean. And that seems to be the point.

When words no longer mean what they so clearly meant 10 minutes ago, you know something must be amiss. George Orwell said so.