links for 2007-11-04

• Hey, not so big spender - Paul Krugman Blog
• Dani Rodrik is a Liar - YouNotSneaky!
• The WSJ's obsession with scare quotes - Brendan Nyhan
• Waterboarding Fun - Hullabaloo
• Why Orwell matters - LA Times
• War, fear and truth (on Orwell) - LA Times
• The limits of language (on Orwell) - LA Times
• Getting inside us (on Orwell) - LA Times
• Making simple expressions dangerous (on Orwell) - LA Times
• The Decline in the U.S. Personal Saving Rate - FRB St. Louis

Comments

[anne]

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79p/

1946

Politics and the English Language
By George Orwell

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent, and our language—so the argument runs—must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad—I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen—but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer....

[anne]

Language really does matter, as suddenly casually joining a religion to "fascist" which we have noticed from the President on shows. I love this parody on complaints that "we" immoralists are becoming "them":

http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/11/blaming_america_first.php

November 1, 2007

Blaming America First
By Matthew Yglesias

I appreciate the effort to put a sense of perspective around the Islamoscaryboogiefascist menace, but this particular branch of the blame America first crowd doesn't really make very much sense. I mean, surely there are more Godless countries out there than the United States; how come the Lord wasn't inflicting his wrath on idolatrous Denmark?

[anne]

Are we paying attention to how democracy and peace are spreading from Iraq through the Middle East and beyond, say from Lebanon to Somalia to Gaza to Pakistan? Pakistan?

[anne]

http://www.juancole.com/
http://icga.blogspot.com/

Juan Cole who has a blog as remarkable and important as Mark Thoma's has comments on the emergency in Pakistan by 2 scholars, one of whom happened to have been lecturing in Pakistan when the emergency was declared, one in Japan, both with knowledge of Urdu.

[anne]

http://icga.blogspot.com/

Columbia University's Barnett Rubin has offered a series of remarkable posts on the Pakistani emergency. Suddenly the Middle East must be understood as entirely beyond purposeful strategic structuring for our purposes. So much for the nutty domino theorists.