The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one?s real and one?s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink?(Orwell)

Opaque political language is still being used to obscure the truth and to rationalize ambiguous political actions. Perhaps the problems in the political language of today began when the September 11th attacks were declared "acts of war" instead of criminal acts. This, of course led to the "War on Terror," an ambiguous phrase denoting an aim that sounds hopeless, but which also demanded an orthodox war, complete with bombs and casualties and a culpable and contained state. In the discourse on this war, terms such as "friendly fire," "preemptive strikes," "collateral damage," and "civilian casualties" allow us to avoid thinking about the violent loss of life that these terms mask. The constant references to fighting for world peace can lull us into the absurd belief that war and violence will produce peace.

As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality , as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader.

Many political words are similarly abused. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, white papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Politics, as a discourse, is valorized by aesthetic modes of being. Holistic totalities are the stuff of politics. Language is used performatively, in an effort to point towards a future where division will be annealed, and where ideology will triumph.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should do and know better.