As Verizon gets set to release the iPhone 4, it looks like its marketing and network management departments are honing their reworked Orwellian vocabularies, reminding us that in wireless network newspeak we need to forget words like “throttling” or “arbitrary broadband discrimination,” and replace them instead with new redefined terms like “VZOptimization.” Lest we commit […]

The Neo-Aristocrats never say what they are really thinking, so they engage in sub communication. If you have the wherewithal to decode their speech patterns you can better understand their demented and twisted rational. I will provide you with examples, explanations and direct quotes. Biodiversity – The Eco-Dictator’s trump card. It is more important that […]

This is plausible: When the very first text message was sent in 1992, no one realized the influence it would have in the worlds of business, education, security, crime and our social lives.  But within a decade of its inception, the world grasped hold of it and ran with it like an Olympian. Text messages were […]

Warspeak: Linguistic Collateral Damage Any war is a war on words as well as on people. No one is proud of the effects of war however proud we might be of the intentions of our fighting forces. Whenever war breaks out, we begin to hear the words “newspeak,” “doublespeak,” “doublethink.” In George Orwell’s 1984, newspeak […]

I cannot imagine that anyone who has come under fire in combat would describe the sensation as friendly – no matter who is pulling the trigger. “Friendly fire” is the prime example of an institution’s attempt to sanitise language to the extent that we know what a phrase is trying to tell us, yet reflect […]

Roger Kimball writes: When I wrote about what Obama’s minions are calling our “kinetic military activity” in Libya, I noted that the folks presiding over Orwell’s Newspeak would have liked the phrase “kinetic military activity.” As a mendacious and evasive euphemism for “war” it is hard to beat. But Orwell is not the only important thinker […]

Rather than call the conflict in Libya a war, the Obama administration has introduced a new phrase into the popular lexicon. “The way I like to put it is, from our standpoint at the Pentagon, we’re involved in a limited kinetic operation,” says Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. President Obama has consistently used the same […]

In the housing sector we are sometimes rather keen on words and phrases that either mean the opposite of their true meaning or that make “lies sound truthful”…..At Harrogate a couple of weeks ago there was much discussion about re-naming the affordable rent regime. A few suggestions were: “so-called affordable rents”, “naffordable”, or simply “unaffordable […]