Maybe it’s not you. We’ll discuss whether honest public discourse is more and more difficult with the increasingly impenetrable language served up in so many fields e.g. academia, economics, geo-politics, science, climate change, medical.
First off, we’d discussed years ago the way language has the power to create its own reality with reference to George Orwell’s famous 1946 essay “Politics And the English Language.” MM 2/13/17 Culture Of Spin then focused on the application of that Orwellian sentiment to the so-called postmodern world, particularly on the college campuses. We might now consider whether linguistic obfuscation has become a way of keeping the world off balance i.e. muddled thinking/writing has itself become the change agent.
The starting point might be the academic world where new ideas and concepts are discussed and considered within a closed laboratory. One personal recollection was an essay served up as part of a liberal arts elective – the subject having something to do with Africa art and colonialism – that, stripped down, made absolutely no sense, grammatically or otherwise. Even the instructor finally agreed. No harm done…
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