WeaselSpeak

It’s important to pay attention to the name the Holy One has for things.
We name everything according to the number of legs it has
But the Holy One names it according to what’s inside.
Moses had a rod. He thought its name was “staff.”
But its name was “dragonish snake.”
-Rumi

Pay attention to language. We all know the picky grammarian who rages about how split infinitives and dangling participles are the advance signs of the demise of western civilization. Intuitively, we know that grammar does not work that way. Bad grammar doesn’t reach far beyond poor communication, confusion. Or does it?

Of late, I have been watching the public conversation around the Iraq War with keen interest in grammar. By now, most of us are catching on to the deliberate use of key words to skew public perception toward a particular point of view. We now know that “death tax” is code for “inheritance tax” and “war on terror” designates “apocalypse. The public, at last, is catching on. So, the language wars now escalate to a new level, WeaselSpeak.

WeaselSpeak is the deployment of verb voices in the service of ideology. Every verb can be expressed in an active voice (We did that.) or a passive voice (The devil made me do it.). What interests me is the clever deployment of the active and passive voices in public discourse, to be used like paints on a canvass to create a scene.

Here’s how the grammar works. Active Verbs are used for magnification. “Al Quaeda has weapons of mass destruction,” for instance. Such magnification magnifies the alarm in an already alarming statement. Active Verbs make Al Quaeda stand tall. Passive verbs shrink the significance of its objects. “Mistakes were made.” Such shrinkage make errors seem trivial. The trick is to use both to paint a picture. Preachers have known about this for a long time. To pair, “God is mighty irate” with “The devil made me do it” creates a scene of impending doom. So it is with using active and passive verbs in the public dialogue.

With the release of the recent National Intelligence Estimate, warmongering spirits are hot into WeaselSpeak to create an illusion of a Towering Terrorist Threat pitted against a Pitiable Presidential Party. Don’t be fooled. As soon as we have taken the bait, the terms will switch. You’ll hear all about the Our Mighty Mega Military in an active voice, just in time to save the day. Such scenarios are alright for cartoons. They are inappropriate in the real world, where lives are at stake.

Now what’s going to happen to us without the barbarians?
They were a kind of solution for us.
-Constantine Cavafy, "Waiting for the Barbarians"