{"id":35363,"date":"2018-04-15T01:00:27","date_gmt":"2018-04-15T05:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=35363"},"modified":"2018-03-25T09:25:02","modified_gmt":"2018-03-25T13:25:02","slug":"qotd-political-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/04\/15\/qotd-political-words\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Political words"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>When one critic writes, &#8220;The outstanding feature of Mr. X&#8217;s work is its living quality,&#8221; while another writes, &#8220;The immediately striking thing about Mr. X&#8217;s work is its peculiar deadness,&#8221; the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like <em>black<\/em> and <em>white<\/em> were involved, instead of the jargon words <em>dead<\/em> and <em>living<\/em>, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word <em>Fascism<\/em> has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies &#8220;something not desirable.&#8221; The words <em>democracy<\/em>, <em>socialism<\/em>, <em>freedom<\/em>, <em>patriotic<\/em>, <em>realistic<\/em>, <em>justice<\/em> have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like <em>democracy<\/em>, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like <em>Marshal P\u00e9tain was a true patriot<\/em>, <em>The Soviet press is the freest in the world<\/em>, <em>The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution<\/em>, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: <em>class<\/em>, <em>totalitarian<\/em>, <em>science<\/em>, <em>progressive<\/em>, <em>reactionary<\/em>, <em>bourgeois<\/em>, <em>equality<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>George Orwell, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mtholyoke.edu\/acad\/intrel\/orwell46.htm\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Politics and the English Language&#8221;<\/a>, 1946.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When one critic writes, &#8220;The outstanding feature of Mr. X&#8217;s work is its living quality,&#8221; while another writes, &#8220;The immediately striking thing about Mr. X&#8217;s work is its peculiar deadness,&#8221; the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,41],"tags":[354,400],"class_list":["post-35363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-georgeorwell","tag-language"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9cn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35363"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35365,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35363\/revisions\/35365"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}