Comments: From Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, by Josef Pieper

W. H. Mallock
"The intellectual barbarians were a phenomenon new to history: they showed us real knowledge in the hands of real ignorance...Seeing just too well to have the true instinct of blindness, and to ill to have the proper guidance from sight, it has tightened its clutch upon the world of thought, only to impart to it its own confusion."

Posted by james wilson at October 7, 2015 10:24 AM

The sole purpose of all media is to sell eyeballs to advertisers. Fat, dumb and happy make for an excellent media consumer.

Posted by leelu at October 7, 2015 1:05 PM

George Orwell writes:

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.

Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse.
It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes.

Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Posted by chasmatic at October 7, 2015 1:13 PM

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