A Commonplace Book

   "I don't know what you mean by `glory,'" Alice said.
   Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant `there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"
   "But glory doesn't mean `a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected.
   "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
   "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
   "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master--that's all."

The fat of sentences is sold to us with the meat untrimmed, and we pay a heavy price in waste for all our information.

How silly we would feel in a powdered wig, exposing our calves in silk knickers, or wearing long peacock feathers, silver buckles, or carrying a fan: yet we bear the language rules of that age of Aristocracy with patience and enthusiasm.

Of course snobbery is part of every language difficulty: WE have learned useless language ornamentation. So shall YOU!

The greatest enemies of language are the bureaucrat and the professional political manipulator: the first is ignorant, stubborn, and a subtle verbal defender of his bureau against the people; the second deals in "double speak" wherein he shrewdly hides his real character under a patriotic lexicon of grammatical lies.

The new class of corporate chiefs, global managers, genetic engineers, and money speculators will reduce language to the level of utility, function, and management. Evil begins not only with words used with malice, but also with words that diminish people, land and life. The prospects of evil grow as those for language decline.

[T]hey believed preventive war was foremost a matter of logic, the only rational solution to the deadly dilemma of nuclear proliferation. As [Bertrand] Rusell put it in an article advocating preventive war in the January 1948 issue of New Commonwealth: "The argument that I have been developing is as simple and as unescapable as a mathematical demonstration." But logic itself can go awry. Nothing captures the whole bizarre episode of preventive war better than the unintentionally Orwellian words of U.S. Secretary of Navy Francis P. Matthews, who in 1950 urged the nation to become "aggressors for peace."

The Rectification of Names

Tsze-lu said, "The ruler of Wei has been waiting for you, in order with you to administer the government. What will you consider the first thing to be done?"
The Master replied, "What is necessary is to rectify names."
"So! indeed!" said Tsze-lu. "You are wide of the mark! Why must there be such rectification?"
The Master said, "How uncultivated you are, Yu! A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve.
"If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.
"When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot.
"Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect."

Usage is always political, of course, but it's complexly political. With respect, for instance, to political change, usage conventions can function in two ways: On the one had they can be a reflection of political change, and on the other they can be an instrument of political change. These two functions are different and have to be kept straight. Confusing them -- in particular, mistaking for political efficacy what is really just a language's political symbolism -- enables the bizarre conviction that America ceases to be elitist or unfair simply because Americans stop using certain vocabulary that is historically associated with elitism and unfairness.

I believe Hollywood won [the Eldred case] because they have successfully repositioned copyright as a property issue. In other words, they successfully urged the world to understand copyright in terms of property. Copyright = property may not be accurate in a strict legal sense, but it still makes common sense, even to the Supreme Court....

While the one side talks about licenses with verbs like copy, distribute, play, share and perform, the other side talks about rights with verbs like own, protect, safeguard, protect, secure, authorize, buy, sell, infringe, pirate, infringe, and steal.

This isn't just a battle of words. It's a battle of understandings. And understandings are framed by conceptual metaphors.

The great writer on the subject of totalitarianism was George Orwell, and "1984" is always worth rereading. Damned if GeeDubya Bush didn't pop up the other day to announce that we must fight a war "for the sake of peace." That's not vaguely Orwellian, it's a direct steal.

"My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."

[P]erhaps the truth is less interesting than the facts?

Way back in 1988, on the 3rd of July, the U.S.S. Vincennes, a missile cruiser stationed in the Persian Gulf, accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner and killed 290 civilian passengers. George Bush the First, who was at the time on his presidential campaign, was asked to comment on the incident. He said quite subtly, "I will never apologize for the United States. I don't care what the facts are."

I don't care what the facts are. What a perfect maxim for the New American Empire. Perhaps a slight variation on the theme would be more apposite: The facts can be whatever we want them to be.

These distraction-oholics. These focus-ophobics.

Old George Orwell got it backward.

Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. he's making sure you're fully absorbed.

He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled.

And this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.

Nixon appears to be a politician with an advertising man's approach to his work. Policies are products to be sold to the public -- this one today, that one tomorrow, depending on the discounts and the state of the market.

Acceleration is certainly a central aspect of our political and economic life, and one of the reasons I've written Nervous States is that I wanted to understand what this does to our liberal institutions. First of all, it means that spaces of deliberation and critique, which have always been integral to liberalism, come to appear slow and 'out of touch.' Modern science, which has been the hallmark of modern progress for four centuries, moves at a pace that is increasingly left behind by the rolling news cycle of digital media and the hunger for instant reaction and decision. Populists seize the opportunity to promise immediate action while liberalism only ever offers mediated action via law, political representatives, editorial peer review and so on. All of this comes to be experienced as intolerably slow and self-interested in the age of the platform. I think, secondly, that our sense of what counts as authentic or honest action has shifted from the domain of reason, with all of the problems and exclusions that went with that, towards that of neurology and automatic response. In the age of Twitter, we no longer judge politicians in terms of their arguments, speeches or policies, but in terms of their facial expressions or instant reactions to some unexpected live event. Like any cultural content, politics is increasingly evaluated in real time, in terms of clicks, eyeballs, likes and so on. All of this means that public figures, be they in the media, politics or arts, end up as live performers -- a bit like sports stars or stand-up comedians -- who achieve credibility through a kind of carefully honed spontaneity. Traditional forms of liberal authority were never designed to achieve such immediate effects on an audience.

When Clinton lies it's a big problem because she's liberal. When Trump lies it's not a problem. He didn't position himself as an honest person in the first place.

[Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language"] expresses one of Orwell's main ideas: clear speech enables clear thought and prevents lies. But I have come to think that he was wrong. What Donald Trump has shown is that clear speech can enable lies.

... Orwell believed that clear language enables clear thought. But Trump demonstrates something quite different: simple language can encourage simple thought. Unburdened by complex ideology, he can take a multifaceted policy with endless trade-offs and paint it as unequivocally good or bad: "The Iran deal is a disaster", "insane", "terrible". Simple language also makes lies more persuasive...