"Speech is conveniently
located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes
for
both."
John Andrew Holmes,
Wisdom in Small Doses
"We
want to create a
sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by
a dip in the waters of euphemism."
Robert Hughes, on political
correctness, 1993
"I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends
shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism."
P.D. James (1920- )"Paris Review" [1995]
"In our time,
political
speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
....(P)olitical
language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and
sheer
cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the
inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned,
the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called
pacification.
Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along
the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of
population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for
years
without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die in Arctic
lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such
phraseology
is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental
pictures
of them.... The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of
Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines
and covering up all
the details. The great enemy of clear language
is insincerity. When
there
is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one
turns as it were
instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish
squirting
out ink."
George Orwell,
Politics
and the English Language
"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."
George
Orwell, Shooting an Elephant
"No
one has a finer command of
language
than the person who keeps his mouth shut."
Sam Rayburn
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