Forest Gregg on Fri, 8 Feb 2008 18:53:28 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> The Ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of Sabotage |
Here's what George Orwell had to say about it, in 1946: One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs. George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946 http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm -Forest On Feb 3, 2008 11:57 AM, Rob Dyke <robdyke@robdyke.com> wrote: > "By slogan: in other words, by only learning the links, those keywords the > grasp of which is anyway sufficient to spell out your allegiances to a > certain ???movement??? (I don???t wish to use the word ???ideology??? here, <...> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org