That Orwell Essay

Canadian author George Case over at Quillette revives George Orwell's essay on inflated, inaccurate writing Politics and the English Language for the thousandth time, but still necessarily so, as stating the obvious continues to be in short supply. He updates the concepts from the 1946 essay taking Orwell's 

Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. ... Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind 

and applying it to such modern phrases as rape culture, in which no identifiable rape, attempted rape, or excusing of rape is produced, but the speaker wants to arouse the same amount of outrage as if one had a basketful of rape kits left over from last weekend's parties. He shows that something similar happens when the word culture is applied to another modern phrase.

cultural genocide seems to be a linguistic device more than an objective phenomenon: by uttering a powerful word but hedging it with a thin qualification, protesters can subtly compare themselves to Jews under Hitler or Cambodians under Pol Pot, winning public support and governmental redress for undergoing mistreatment significantly milder than what the word stands for alone.*

It is unfortunately all to easy to correct such excesses, such as not calling something systemic racism when you mean it is widespread and sometimes subtle. "Systemic" has a meaning, as even I have been able to discern and discuss here, as well as a number of other posts. It is a shorthand for saying we are all to blame, and always - slyly - a call to get many of the current people out and their own people in as the solution. Take power away from these people and give it to these people, that's the ticket. And I myself want a pony when it's all done. Hate/-phobia/denial is another evasive construction that Case calls out. 

He does a good job.  He does well with words because he does well with thinking, which is a great deal of Orwell's point. In every generation lazy thinkers will try to use the juice out of dramatic words without having evidence to justify their inclusion, and our updating of the listings is necessary in every generation as well. I wonder how many of the battles are already lost, however.  I have been railing against the imprecise use of -phobia ans in homophobia, which used to have a specific meaning in clinical psychology, since the 1980s.  It doesn't mean that we have to just shrug and start using it ourselves, because a rearguard action even during a long defeat not only has nobility and honor, but real use in reminding people about precision. Yet perhaps our energy would be put to better use finding newer phrases that can be strangled in the cradle. There will always be new phrases that are cheats, attempting to use strong words in defense of weak ideas, but we can at least make them work for it.

Ann Althouse and Glenn Loury are people who notice new usages early in their life-cycle and raise the proper questions: Is this word justified? Is it true? Have we seen it used legitimately in other contexts? Is it ungainly and ugly?  

If you have favorites you can use the spot here.

*It is often noted that using some words as adjectives is always a red flag, such as "social," which used to be a good word but is now mostly emotion, while some nouns are suspect whenever they are modified, such as "justice." Suggesting that "social justice" is particularly deceitful - which it is.