The Lexicon

Somewhat, a break from politics. I use the word somewhat because many politically-oriented words have been co-opted over the past several decades. Before expounding upon the changes in politically-oriented words, please watch the video below, which offers some interesting observations about words which have changed meanings over the centuries:


Now please provide your observations as to how politically-oriented terminology has been co-opted by the opposition and thus reduced "the conversations" to blather.

My input...

Clichés

(For politics, please scroll down)

Good ol' clichés. Well, maybe not so good. Lack of originality!

Aside from being both unoriginal and boring, clichés can be thought-terminating:

In his 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton introduced the term "thought-terminating cliché".^[15] This refers to a cliché that is a commonly used phrase, or folk wisdom, sometimes used to quell cognitive dissonance. Though the clichéd phrase in and of itself may be valid in certain contexts, its application as a means of dismissing dissent or justifying fallacious logic is what makes it thought-terminating.

Lifton wrote:

"The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis."^[15]

In George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the fictional constructed language Newspeak is designed to eliminate the ability to express unorthodox thoughts.^[16] Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World society uses thought-terminating clichés in a more conventional manner, most notably in regard to the drug soma as well as modified versions of real-life platitudes, such as "A doctor a day keeps the jim-jams away".^[17]

In her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt described Adolf Eichmann as an intelligent man who used clichés and platitudes to justify his actions and the role he played in the Jewish genocide of World War II. For her, these phrases are symptomatic of an absence of thought. Arendt wrote, "When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence."^[18]

A few irksome clichés from recent television broadcasts:

(1) "at the end of the day"

(2) "oh, and by the way"

(3) "shared values"

(4) "going forward"

(5) "We need to have a conversation about...."

What other clichés permeate the conversation today?

Break From Politics

(For politics, please scroll down)

One of my Facebook finds and a fascinating lesson about our lexicon: