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:: Wednesday, November 10, 2004 ::
The Top 12 Election Spinspeak List
Here are the election language pollution winners: the “Top Twelve Spinspeak Obfuscations” of the presidential campaign.
The Top Twelve List including only spinspeak minted or reminted for the campaign was compiled as a supplement to the newly-published Spinspeak II: The Dictionary of Language Pollution. All selections were made using the dictionary’s key criteria of packing familiar words with new, tendentious meaning and moving them away from reality.
The “Top Twelve”:
nuance = fogword for blatant political hypocrisy as in nuancing one’s position on an issue on which one takes all sides many times.
Massachusetts liberal = negative engorgement icon for implying that deep down all liberals are rich, godless, elitist socialists who pander to the poor, gays and blacks; encourage murder of the unborn; appease deadly enemies foreign and domestic, and laugh at morality..
urban = fuzzball for liberal; takes the place of the rather threadbare fuzzballs “mainstream” and “progressive.”
plan = gift-wrap packagetalk for a “real,” usually "secret” or certainly sparsely detailed solution for every major problem without pain or cost. Such plans usually have little or no cost because they will be offset by canceling “tax breaks for the rich,” “eliminating waste, fraud and inefficiency” and canceling handouts to select “special interests.”
sensitive war = mushmundspeak for war that must be conducted with only one or two minor casualties on either side somewhat like no-loser school sports and painless fishing.
global test = delayspeak for we covert appeasers carry a Big Stick and will smite our sworn enemies mightily as soon as congenital obstructionists such as France and the kleptocrats in the U.N. say they approve.
nuisance = cozytalk for equating terrorists who blow up school buses, behead people at random and plot everyday to obtain dirty nuclear weapons as nothing more worrisome than pickpockets, noisy motorcyclists and prostitutes down on their luck.
imminent = peacenik worldendtalk for only when the bad guys are coming over the walls is preventive war justified.
but = negation codetalk fuzzball for here’s what I really, really think, therefore, forget everything that I just said and, in fact, anything that I said in the past (at least for the present).
two Americas = fantasyspeak for fellow-traveler nostalgia for an America divided between overfed “malefactors of great wealth” in high silk hats and underfed “mill workers” who sit around chipped kitchen tables piled with unpaid bills under flickering bare light bulbs; deep roots in American commiespeak.
Wal-Mart voter = elitist cutespeak put-down for all of those dopes in "flyover country" who voted for Bush.
accurate fake = denialspeak for insisting that that the facts in a clearly fake, discredited document are really, really “accurate.”
:: James Baar 11/10/2004 07:27:00 AM [+] ::
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