- Reaction score
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- Points
- 410
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/the-growing-pandemic-of-political-speak-1.2618268
Good CBC piece here on work by Canadian born Stephen Pinker, a Harvard thinker who has taken on the whole sickening issue of the idiotic way that many politicians, corporate types and academics speak these days.
The article's author gives an example:
And other such blither. We see and hear it everywhere. "Going forward" instead of "in the future". "Highly impactful" instead of "will have an effect" or "we've dialogued that" instead of "we've talked about it".
And, of course "we'll revisit that" instead of "Ooops! We f****cked up!"
What really bothers me is the increasing tendency for this sort of obscurant rubbish to creep into military communications: to a certain extent I think it is a disease that is spread from the political/bureaucrat world in Ottawa into NDHQ, and then outwards across the CAF, usually at the GO/FO level.
Good CBC piece here on work by Canadian born Stephen Pinker, a Harvard thinker who has taken on the whole sickening issue of the idiotic way that many politicians, corporate types and academics speak these days.
The article's author gives an example:
...My daughter, a senior at McGill, was recently puzzling over a criticism by Wahneema Lubiano, a professor at Duke University, of Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing.
Lee's use of "vernacularity cannot guarantee counter-hegemonic cultural resistance," chided Lubiano. "One can be caught up in Euro-American hegemony within the vernacular, and one can repeat the masculinism and heterosexism of vernacular culture. Vernacular language and cultural productions allow the possibility of discursive power disruptions, of cultural resistance — they do not guarantee it."..
And other such blither. We see and hear it everywhere. "Going forward" instead of "in the future". "Highly impactful" instead of "will have an effect" or "we've dialogued that" instead of "we've talked about it".
And, of course "we'll revisit that" instead of "Ooops! We f****cked up!"
What really bothers me is the increasing tendency for this sort of obscurant rubbish to creep into military communications: to a certain extent I think it is a disease that is spread from the political/bureaucrat world in Ottawa into NDHQ, and then outwards across the CAF, usually at the GO/FO level.