Word: newspeak
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...progressing. The hero tells himself he can't decide what the history is, he'd better wait until the afternoon news broadcast to find out. Orwell's point in 1984, that a government can keep shifting the terms of its existence, not only historical but linguistic--in Newspeak euphemisms--is an important point and one often stressed by critics of the present U.S. government, who are, for the most part, right. But it's not the kind of criticism one bandies about on "The Left" or within "The Movement...
...words, literary and historical allusions and outlandish bits of jargon to taunt, flatter or flay adversaries. He has stormed the rostrum to denounce the General Assembly as "a theater of the absurd" and to dismiss reports on American imperialism as "rubbish." When something clear and pleasing emerges from U.N. newspeak, he quotes James Joyce to describe the rare phenomenon: "Its whatness leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance ... the object achieves its epiphany...
...even the most banal ideas with importance. Discussing his institution's money troubles, a university president promises: "We will divert the force of this fiscal stress into leverage energy and pry important budgetary considerations and control out of our fiscal and administrative procedures." This is a W.C. Fields newspeak, the earnestly pseudoprecise diction beloved of bureaucrats, who imagine that its blind impregnability will give their ideas some authoritative heft. In fact, it only confirms the Confucian maxim: "If language is incorrect, then what is said is not meant. If what is said is not meant, then what ought...
What Stockwell wants and MacCracken resisted is the addition of political emphases to traditional relief work. Using the latest ecumenical Newspeak, Stockwell urges a major commitment to "justice/liberation/systemic change concerns" and also "education/ conscientization programs" aimed at U.S. churchgoers. Behind the impasto of jargon is the basic idea that traditional relief and development programs serve as a mere "Band-Aid" and fail to remove the political causes of poverty...
...that "being famous was like being a box of Oxydol." Our Gang, The Breast and now The Great American Novel (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; $8.95) definitely have extra-literary dimensions. They are also packaging and merchandising problems. Our Gang, which began with ten pages of devastatingly accurate satire of Nixonian newspeak, quickly slid into labored collegiate humor. Grossly padded-including too many blank end papers and repetitive title pages-the book became a $5.95 hardback steppingstone to a profitable publishing venture. Ditto The Breast, whose 78 pages scarcely filled a training...