Lies, damned lies... and the double-speak I would expunge

'Climate change', 'infant mortality', 'fair trade'... the list goes on

By Johann Hari
The Independent

"The English language needs periodically to be given a spring-clean, where we scrape off the phrases that have become stuck to the floor and toss out the rotting metaphors that have fallen down the back of the settee. George Orwell warned that language will inevitably become cluttered with phrases that have lost their meaning – or, worse, are actually "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind". He advised: "If one gets rid of these bad habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration."

I'm not talking about the clichés that crowd us every day. "Your call is very important to us..." we are told, by automated voices that don't give a toss about our call, because if they did, they'd employ somebody to actually answer the damn phone......

No – I am talking about phrases that, while posing as neutral descriptions of the world, contain a hidden political agenda that then moulds the assumptions of the listener. An obvious recent example is the phrase "enhanced interrogation techniques", a euphemism deliberately created by the American right to disinfect torture and make it sound reasonable. Language is often deliberately bent and misshapen for political reasons in this way.......

These phrases can be successfully driven from the language: during the Vietnam War, news reports blandly referred to slaughtered civilians as "collateral damage" – a bloodless phrase that evokes nothing. Today, even the Pentagon press officers avoid those words when describing the death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan, because it has been so thoroughly satirised.......

"Infant mortality." This sounds clinical and antiseptic – who feels moved when they hear it? – when what we are in fact talking about is dead babies. Here's an example. In Malawi in southeast Africa, the country's soil became badly depleted by overuse, so the democratic government there adopted a sensible policy of subsidising fertiliser. The nation's hungry farmers were given sacks of it at a third of its real cost – and the country bloomed. Then the World Bank damned this as a "market distortion" and said that if Malawi wanted to keep receiving loans it had to stop them at once. So the subsidies stopped, and the country's crops failed. A famine began – and "infant mortality rose".

That's the dull phrase. What we mean is – lots of babies died, totally needlessly. Three years ago, the Malawian government finally told the World Bank to stick its loans, and subsidized fertiliser again. Now nobody there is starving, and the country is the single biggest exporter of corn to the World Food Programme in southern Africa......

Orwell said we must "let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around". If they are dead babies, call them dead babies. If the ecosystem is unravelling, say the ecosystem is unravelling. It is only when we honestly describe the world that we can begin to change it."