Words

Regular readers know that I feel rather strongly that the Bush administration has corrupted our vocabulary with a view to mislead us. The current NY Review has an article on the subject which you should read. You know that Bush and company are not breaking ground here as David Bromwich, the author, begins by quoting Tacitus:

To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of "government"; they create a desolation and call it peace.

Some of the Bush terms that Bromwich discusses are

• the birth pangs of a new Middle East
• global war on terrorism
• slight uptick in violence
• contractors
• surge
• professional interrogation techniques
• simulated drowning

He concludes with this

"History begins today" was a saying in the Bush White House on September 12, 2001—repeated with menace by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to the director of Pakistani intelligence Mahmoud Ahmad—a statement that on its face exhibits a totalitarian presumption. Yet nothing so much as language supplies our memory of things that came before today; and, to an astounding degree, the Bush and Cheney administration has succeeded in persuading the most powerful and (at one time) the best-informed country in the world that history began on September 12, 2001. The effect has been to tranquilize our self-doubts and externalize all the evils we dare to think of. In this sense, the changes of usage and the corruptions of sense that have followed the global war on terrorism are inseparable from the destructive acts of that war.