On topic, it is interesting the way language is used in America today, the destruction of Hillary Clinton and bombast of Donald Trump are key examples. A book I quoted above gives twenty lessons on recognizing tyranny, a section from number 9 is quoted below.
# 9 Be kind to our language. "Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that, thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books."
"Victor Klemperer, a literary scholar of Jewish origin, turned his philological training against Nazi propaganda. He noticed how Hitler's language rejected legitimate opposition: The people always meant some people and not others (the president [Trump] uses the word in this way), encounters were always struggles (the president says winning), and any attempt by free people to understand the world in a different way was defamation of the leader (or, as the president puts it, libel).
Politicians in our times feed their cliches to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the succession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is "breaking" until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean.
The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli. Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is also looking at a picture. We take this collective trance to be normal. We have slowly fallen into it.
More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought. In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, firemen find and burn books while most citizens watch interactive television. In George Orwel1's 1984, published in 1949, books are banned and television is two-way, allowing the government to observe citizens at all times. In 1984, the language of visual media is highly constrained, to starve the public of the concepts needed to think about the present, remember the past, and consider the future. One of the regime's projects is to limit the language further by eliminating ever more words with each edition of the official dictionary." page 60-61 'On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century' by Timothy Snyder
"History shows that there is nothing so easy to enslave and nothing so hard to emancipate as ignorance, hence it becomes the double enemy of civilization. By its servility it is the prey of tyranny, and by its credulity it is the foe of enlightenment." Lemuel K. Washburn
