[NOISE] Re: A Modest Proposal: Fattening up the Proles

[Bruce Baugh <bruceab@teleport.com>]

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At 08:54 AM 1/17/96 -0500, John Young <jya@pipeline.com>wrote:

>   By any means, emulate elitist indolents and avoid anxiety.
>   Display iron-fisted civilized beliefs, practice tough-love
>   humiliation and master-over-slave manners and militant
>   mind-couture, but do nothing truly disruptive of the status
>   quo that so rewards niche market exploiters of genuine
>   dissent.

The patient displays advanced signs of Stephen Donaldson's Disease. We
recommend _immediate_ replacement of the TrendyLeft <tm> thesaurus and
spelling checker package with more robust models. Strunk&White GoodWrite
<tm>, say, or perhaps RichardScarrySoft <tm>.

More seriously, I recommend a re-reading (or first reading, as it may be) of
Orwell's "Politics and the English Language". I quote:

"In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. ...
Orthdoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.
The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles,
manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of under-secretaries do, of
course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost
never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one
watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar
phrases - bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples
of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder - one often has a curious feeling
that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy. ... And
this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology
has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. ...

"Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian
totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, 'I believe in killing off your
opponents when you can get good results by doing so.' Probably, therefore,
he will say something like: 'While freely conceding that the Soviet regime
exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore,
we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political
opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, adn that
the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have
been amply justified in the sphere of concrete acheivement.'

"The inflated sytle is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words
falls upon the facts like soft now, blurring the outlines and covering up
all the details."

Ironically, of course, Tim May's brutal honesty (right or wrong, he's almost
always clear) is lots more "populist", the sense of being readily and widely
understood, than John Young's stale academese.

Bruce Baugh
bruceab@teleport.com
http://www.teleport.com/~bruceab

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Bruce Baugh
bruceab@teleport.com
http://www.teleport.com/~bruceab