Say, What?

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.

The danger arises when fuzzy thinking/writing escapes the lab and infects the world, a point illustrated years ago when an academic journal accepted for publication a hoax nonsensical paper (which proposed that gravity was a social construct) written in the postmodernist style (reference, the Sokal paper).

You may enjoy the experience of producing your own impressive-sounding essays from random text by simply tapping into this Linguistic Generator, instantly generating, each and every time and as fast as you can click, a brand new pseudo-intellectual passage written in that distinctive postmodern prose. Try it.

All in fun, of course, until the implications of gobbledygook become serious. Maybe start with monetary policy. How many tried to make sense of one of those famously-incoherent Greenspan Fed announcements a couple of decades ago? Many nodding their heads in apparent fawning appreciation of “the maestro” couldn’t explain what he was saying. Even the Time magazine cover story, which placed him among the committee that saved the world, didn’t get it straight. Saved the world from what . . . . from a simple declarative sentence? Thanks for slipping us the $34 trillion national debt.

Maybe sleight-of-language has even helped launch wars e.g. remember the way the ever-expanding ding-dong was encroaching the doo-dah that resulted in the country’s Indo-China adventure featuring 58,220 American deaths? It took Robert McNamara’s ultimate confession (in the preface to his book “Fog Of War”) that “mistakes were made, terrible mistakes of judgment” to finally give us a straight answer.

The serious point in all of this is probably the most radical of all i.e. think for yourself and be particularly mindful when confronted by what seems to be impenetrable prose. To repeat the initial sentence, maybe it’s not you.

Am anxiously awaiting Fauci’s upcoming “Fog Of Pandemic.”