Indeed, when it comes to euphemisms, we are spoilt for choice. Unwilling to face reality, they trade plaintalk for euphemism, and discourse for strawmans. Much of their communications, Orwell observes, involve “gumming together long strips of words… and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.” They choose words not for clarity but for convenience-turning lies into truth, horror into virtue, hoaxes into science, and water into wine. Most will agree, I think, that the language of government, academia, and enterprise remains just as stagnant. They were in a bad storm and called it atmospheric ventilation.” J.K. The public heard the monetary experts and authorities speaking with wonderful solemnity of the ‘float’ and imagined that they had found something new. So, instead of speaking of currency instability or unpredictability or disorder or chaos, the term ‘floating currency’ was invented. Economists and central bankers invented the reference in floating currencies when instability in the exchanges became inevitable… But what was inevitable and inconvenient could be improved by giving it a better name. When interviewer Nicole Salinger asked the economist John Kenneth Galbraith to explain the term “floating currency” to a general audience, his reply was blunt: Let us take, for example, the language of finance.

Language, like alcoholism, can be a self-reinforcing manifestation of our “mental vices”. Foolish and wicked thoughts lead to slovenly language, just as slovenly language leads to foolish and wicked thoughts. George Orwell says that language suffers from a similar affliction. We are taught early in life about the vicious cycle of alcoholism-that people drink to escape despair only to find themselves deeper in misery.

George orwell political language