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Misleading Words and Phrases
Words are important; if you tell a woman she has a good figure, she will take the compliment; if you tell the same woman that she has a good body , she will usually be slightly uncomfortable that there is a sexual innuendo in your compliment. Politicians are masters of abusing words as George Orwell showed in 1984. In his novel the Ministry of Love was about hate, and the Ministry of Peace was about war. The Ministry of Plenty tried to manage the shortages of food and basic materials and the Ministry of Truth conduct vicious untruthful propaganda.
The politicians of today are also masters of abusing words and inventing words which have no meaning but sound good or make those politicians appear benign when they are espousing vicious policies. You will never hear a Labour politician talk about the recent recession without prefacing “recession” with “the world global financial”, to make it sound that every county suffered recession (not every country did – many countries prospered) and thus giving the impression that the recession had nothing to do with the Labour government of the time.
“Diversity” is a word which has been given a meaning which couples it with a sense of good and morality; yet people can suffer from a diversity of diseases and a diversity of plagues. ”
Austerity” has also acquired a different meaning. Austerity is no more than not being profligate, yet among the politicians of today it seems to have acquired a sense of inflicting harm and deprivation. No matter that you cannot spend what you do not have except by borrowing and no matter that in order to have our comfort today we sacrifice the futures of those who are young. In the second world war the vast majority of people in every nation involved thought the sacrifice they made worthwhile to protect the young and the unborn. The politics of parties such as the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru makes a virtue of sacrificing the children of today at the alter of present comfort.
Politicians of all hues talk about creating jobs but the only jobs that politicians actually create are those of the pork barrel variety or for patronage and such jobs are not required. All politicians can do is to create an environment where people want to employ people.
The final part of this rant (and I regret that it is somewhat of a rant but words are important) is the use of the word “issues” when “problems” is meant. An issue is a problematical topic. A problem is a specific conundrum. However with politicians everything that concerns them is an issue, and there are almost no problems. Thus they cannot be accused of not solving a problem, because there are not any problems and no one talks of solving an issue. You just have to do something about an issue and that is much easier than solving a real problem.
Filed under: climate change Tagged: george orwell, issues, misleading phrases, misleading words, Plaid Cymru, politicans, politics, problems, recession, SNP, words 
Source: https://robertkyriakides.wordpress.com/2015/04/20/misleading-words-and-phrases/
