Newspeak

By William Bedford —— Bio and Archives February 10, 2008

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It's a true fact that a language would wither and die if it were not kept well fertilized with new words and phrases. On the other hand, at the end of the day, the bottom line is, when words like gay are given new meaning and nouns like parent are used as verbs, we tend to use them ad-nauseam.

There are times when I fear that if one more person tells me to have a nice day, or that something is deja vu all over again, I’ll freak out, big time. It used to be that Hollywood took the credit, or the blame, as the case may be, for introducing newspeak. Then came the Pentagon nerds with their smart bombs, over-kill and collateral damage. Next came the computer whiz kids explaining to us cybernetic illiterates what does and what does not compute. Then there’s the advertising business with its bottomless pit of inane phrases such as mobile homes that sleep four, and soup that eats like a meal. And we mustn't forget the erudite sportscasters who talk about our athletes being medaled at the Olympics. Some words and phrases, such as stoned, laid-back and no-problem seem to have found a permanent home in the idiom, while others, like groovy, soon get totaled on the idiomatic highway. Some phrases, such as Mickey Mouse., meaning something of little value, fast-forward around the planet in nano seconds, while others, like the ubiquitous have a nice day took about 40 years to download from La-la-Land to the rest of the world. Politics has also given us its share of newspeak. Ever since George Bush the elder claimed that he wasn't in the Reagan Loop, and therefore knew nothing about the CIA's habit of dispatching Latin American Communists with extreme prejudice, nobody is in the know anymore, they are all in the Loop. Remember John Dean of Watergate fame? He had the whole world echoing his: "at this point in time". A long time ago in an Ontario far away it was common to hear a guy refer to his buddy as his boyfriend. Today, a guy’s boyfriend is a little more than his buddy. And when we talked of people having a gay old time we simply meant that heterosexual couples were having themselves a ball. The term free gift is now standard usage even among the eggheads at the CBC. Though, personally I feel that any gift worth having is worth shelling out for. Anyway, at this point in time I'm peed off to the max with people telling me how badly impacted they are by the limping stock market, and how their career path is being flat-lined because of downsizing and off-shoring. So ear-ball this: Lighten up, get a life, and give me a break from newspeak before I go postal!” Does this mean that I'm suffering from cliché and buzzword fatigue? You got that right, babe. And I'm not going to take it anymore. So, if you can’t prattle your point in plain lingo, you should just chill-out or self-destruct. Or, bite me! As they say.