Speaking of absurdities and wrong thoughts and the difficulty of addressing the real meat of this subject....
....a quote from George Orwell's Politics and the English Language --
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it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
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I would say that effective propaganda and slovenly use of the english language (in our case) go together like stink and you know what...
(to whomever may be interested) mull this quote over in your head a few times...
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THE RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war....
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THE RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war....
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THE RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war....
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The thing is....the guy writing that the RAF and US were bombing the s--- out of Iraq because they wanted Saddam to start a war isn't some schmuck from the hinterlands, he's a guy writing for, and being edited by, the London Times. We're talking about the king james version of english news papers here, and they can't quite bring themselves to say that the RAF and US started the war in plain english.
The problem I have discussing this topic is not the lack of examples such as this, but instead the extent to which such examples of slovenly thinking / speaking / writing are a) endemic and b) invariably framed in such a way as to support the interests of the proverbial 'powers that be'.