Desiring Machine

I have been reading Geoffrey Nunberg’s latest book Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.

It is a great book because it does an excellent job outlining the specific ways language permeates our politics. I will attempt a full review once I am finished but I do want to showcase this excellent point Geoffrey makes early in the book about Orwellian “Newspeak” and political language:

That’s the paradox of our attitudes about political language: each of us believes that we’re inured to manipulation, but that everyone else in the room is susceptible to it. There’s always an undercurrent of condescension when people describe some bit of language as Orwellian: “Mind you, I’m not fooled for an instant, but Joe Sixpack is likely to fall for it.” When we picture the prison house of language, it’s always from the outside looking in.