Words

      I'm doing this post early as I won't be able to post at my usual time tomorrow and I think I might have conditioned myself to not be able to post during the day. So I'm writing this at one in the morning instead. Anyway, this post is about words. More specifically the power of words.
      I'm a big fan of words. They've got many uses and they're quite necessary for general living. For example, this blog would be rather different if it was in the medium of interpretive dance. It would probably be more interesting to be fair, and I'd need some sort of move to say "I've left it too late to finish this dance, so I'll just bust this move and finish." It would also be interesting to see if me dancing "bust this move" comes across as awkward as me saying it.
      What really makes language a better medium than any other for mass information transfer is its malleability. Language absorbs the culture it is in and culture absorbs the language it holds. Every word is its own flavour, changing every time it is used and so not only are words used to tell stories, each word contains its own story.
      This brings me to my main point. Many people complain about politically correct language and often they are just in their complaints. But it is often the case that people quite simply don't understand the damage that the right word with the right flavour and story can inflict. If people use words with negative connotations every day they begin to believe those connotations are fact. It also reinforces these beliefs to whoever the person is talking to. George Orwell writes about this in 1984, where one of the characters has the job of 'destroying' words, removing them from the lexicon, with the reasoning that if a word doesn't exist then we can't think that word, we can't think that meaning. Even if we can think something is "bad" or "doubleplusbad", it still lacks the  flavour of words such as "disgusting" or "vile". Governments know the power of this. For example the American government has never condoned torture. However, enhanced interrogation techniques are completely acceptable and it's very difficult to get enraged about enhanced interrogation techniques. Of course the destruction of language itself is not a good thing, but I feel we must be careful with how we use language. For example, we should probably avoid writing rambling blog posts that finish at half three in the morning (I'd like to point out I didn't spend the last two and a half hours just writing this, as that would imply a very slow typing speed).