Tag: language

Commentary: A Case for the Lost Art of Memorization

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Memorization and recitation became part of my life through a club I was part of in middle and high school. With the club, I had the opportunity to recite patriotic speeches and poems along with chapters from the Bible in front of an audience of veterans, law enforcement officers, and first responders just about every month. I loved seeing how the words recited touched the people listening.

Almost without fail, after we spoke, adults would come over to thank us, amazed by the fact that we could remember so much and recite it with such confidence. Often, people said something along the lines of “I never thought kids could do that” or “That’s more than I would ever be able to do.”

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Commentary: The Language of Politics and the Politics of Language

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On his blog A Pilgrim in Narnia, Brenton Dickieson tells us that C.S. Lewis in his Studies in Words defined “verbicide” as the “murder of words.” Dickieson adds that “Lewis has some similar concerns as George Orwell in his ‘Politics and the English Language.’ Words can be politicized or bent into the service of those who are peddling products or ideas.”

The 21st century has given us a multitude of these vampires, who—having sucked the original meanings out of certain nouns and verbs—then use the carcasses to sell certain ideologies or to confuse the rest of us. Here is a partial list of these zombie words.

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Google Launches New ‘Inclusive Language’ Function

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The search engine giant Google has rolled out a new feature that acts as an auto-suggestion for changing certain language to more politically correct terms.

According to the Daily Mail, users who type out certain words will be faced with several suggestions encouraging them to adopt language that is gender-neutral, or otherwise more politically correct. For example, “landlord” will yield suggestions such as “proprietor” or “property owner,” while “mankind” will lead to the suggestion of “humankind.” “Policeman” is now recommended to be “police officers,” while “housewife” is to be replaced with “stay-at-home spouse.”

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Commentary: We Must Never Cede Language to the Left

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In 2001, I served in the Michigan State Senate. One morning our then-governor, John Engler, met with our Republican caucus to promote his idea of consolidating several state entities within a single department by executive order. Characteristic of his transformational tenure, Engler was endeavoring to further streamline the Michigan bureaucracy to provide more efficient and effective services, promote accountability within state government, and save taxpayers’ money. 

When the governor finished his convincing pitch for the Department of History, Arts, and Culture, I raised my hand: “Governor, you know the new department’s acronym will be hack (HAC)?”

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Commentary: It Is So Important Not to Offend Those Breaking Our Laws

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The adage that “actions speak louder than words” may be true, but the right words applied to the right situation can inspire actions that otherwise would not be taken.

We are seeing this in dramatic fashion in our current border crisis, which now appears to be the realized dream of Barack Obama when he spoke about “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” 13 years ago. We as a nation are undeniably transforming, and most Americans would argue for the worse. The wheels of that transformation have been lubricated by the enabling language of the anti-borders Left.

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Commentary: The Right Needs to Take Language Seriously

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by Deion A. Kathawa   The Left’s ideas receive a major boost in ubiquity and apparent credibility because progressives control nearly all of the America’s major taste-making institutions: Hollywood, the universities, K-12 education, and the media. Such control allows progressives to set the terms of national debates, demarcating the range of acceptable opinions on any given subject. It gives rise to another ability: the power to (re)define terms by fiat. After all, when the vast majority of the most credentialed people in virtually all of the most influential organs of civil society are saying X, the average person is hard pressed to meaningfully push back and say Y. The sheer saturation of the information space is a formidable hurdle for even the most savvy to overcome. Take immigration, for example. The Left insists, night and day, that true Americans should be perfectly happy to accept virtually unlimited migrant flows through our southern border. Not only that, but compassion demands we accept virtually all comers. Only bigots could want controlled immigration. As for the national interest, surely it’s in our interest to open our country to strivers and Dreamers. See what just happened? Our historical practice of accepting large numbers of immigrants, contingent on the need to build up a young America, has…

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Analysis: Abortion Debate Shows How Media Deploys Language Gymnastics to Serve Left-Wing Goals

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by Jarrett Stepman   “Pregnancy Kills. Abortion Saves Lives.” That was the headline on an absurd opinion article in The New York Times, deploying Orwellian language to turn the abortion debate on pro-lifers and comfort those who support abortion on demand. While the conversation over Alabama’s new abortion law has drawn out some wild arguments from the left, it’s easy to miss the less obvious ways the media reinforce the pro-abortion side. The media, cleverly and often subtly, use rhetorical adjustments to reinforce left-wing ideas under the guise of objectivity. [ The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more ] It’s not just on the abortion issue that the media kowtow to the left in the terminology they use in charged public debates. For instance, The Guardian, a British outlet, recently updated its style guide to reinforce the idea that challenging prevailing left-wing ideas about man-made climate change is fundamentally illegitimate. The Guardian is updating our style guide to accurately reflect the nature of the environmental crisis. “Climate change” —> “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown” “Global warming” —> “global heating” “Climate skeptic” —> “climate science denier”https://t.co/ags5nyz3Pe — Julia Carrie…

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Commentary: Political Correctness, Just One Tool In The Arsenal Of ‘Sustainability’

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by Kathleen Marquardt, Vice President, American Policy Center   “At its worst, political correctness is nothing different from Orwell’s Newspeak – an attempt to change the way people think by forcibly changing the way they speak.” ~ Urban Dictionary “Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well by creating the international child of the future.” Chester M. Pierce, Harvard psychiatrist, speaking as an expert in public education at the 1973 International Education Seminar. The “Dear Hillary” letter, written on Nov. 11, 1992 by Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), lays out a plan “to remold the entire American system” into “a seamless web that literally extends from cradle to grave and is the same system for everyone,” coordinated by “a system of labor market boards at the local, state and federal levels” where curriculum and “job matching” will be handled by counselors “accessing…

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Do You Have the ‘Bandwidth’ to Cope with That ‘Dumpster Fire’?

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How fast can you say “dumpster fire” (as opposed to “disaster”)? One source has now made the informal expression quite kosher. Here’s the example of its use in a sentence: “So while 2017 has been, by many measures, a complete dumpster fire of a year, New Yorkers can at the very least take refuge in the fact that their city is becoming an even safer place to live. — Clayton Guse”

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