MILLENIAL GLOOM suffuses social media these days. Nobodys seen a worse government in Australia. Thats because we havent had one. A few greybeards can recall the Thatcher years, the only reasonable comparison, & this does little to bring much cheer. The name of Orwell is invoked almost daily. What would George Orwell have said of the mess the world is in? Having once spent a fascinating (if dusty) semester delving into Orwells correspondence & journalism, I feel I know a little about the bloke, & I dont think things are quite as bad as we might fear. In 1984 & a little earlier in his greatest essay, Politics & the English Language, Orwell did of course warn us of what happens when an all-powerful state starts telling us not only what we can think, but what words we are allowed to use. Give the state control of language, & what few freedoms we still have soon enough mean nothing. Words & phrases are indeed changing before our eyes daily under LNP stewardship. Yet most of it is not the result of a sinister long-term master-plan, but of stupidity & incompetence. A few modest examples. Lift, lean & entitlement have grown new accretions of meaning & will never be seen in quite the same way. Christian now seems to refer only to Leviticus, the other 65 Books having been deemed surplus to requirement. This was the Hebrew book of laws, very big on crimes and punishments: Hillsong Morrison loves all of them, especially the bits about shall be done to death. Scholarship used to refer to a reward for academic performance; now it belongs to the same family of words as payola , kickback , or even the little-used Arabic word baksheesh. Conservation seems to have something to do with allowing frackers & loggers to do whatever they want wherever they want to. Dont even get me started on that grand old phrase economic management , not with the LNP having borrowed $126 billion over the past 15 months. Some words also disappear. Refugee is one of them. Honesty is another. One great job the LNP has done is to return that grand old Aussie word bludger to its original meaning. English-speakers from Shakespeare to the 19th century would have used it to refer to a pimp, a member of a press-gang, or a highwayman, for the word is a contraction of bludgeoner. Such men use violence real or implied to take advantage of weaker folk. If you can think of a more fitting symbol of LNP government Id like to hear it.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 05:58:56 +0000