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| Pompous platitudes presented at Davos, per paired teleprompters, link below. |
Links here, here, and here, and then a giant Davos pile, here.
Woo-woo, look at this. Inner Party; as inner as it gets. Unopposed it is worse, opposed it remains. An example of how English as a Second Language education effort can reach beyond grammar and vocabulary. You can watch that Davos stuff, the not absent but only occasional misreading of the teleprompter, with English as your first or second language; and you can enjoy what you hear - if it brings you joy more than loathing. Steve Bullock and Tulsi Gabbard admittedly are imperfect, but are quantum leaps above what the final 2020 two-party money-driven pairing will be for you to hold your nose and vote, exactly as was 2016.
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| quantum leaps are feasible, given the ground state |
At least we don't have Doug Wardlow to kick around anymore. Or not? Happy holidays.
_________UPDATE__________
George Orwell wrote a 1946 essay not greatly distant from his fiction. Think, Twitter and those who Tweet, in terms of the direction our language takes us.
It is interesting Orwell, cutting cleanly:
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
Then later at length:
In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you
think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose – not simply accept – the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one’s words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Sometimes a barbarous common usage can best convey feeling lost if a move toward better manners overrules an instinct. Barbarous things need to be discussed in fit terms to where delicate words can misstate or tone down a belief. Yet understatement sometimes is best to expose an insincerity. Often it is so, but effective understatement is difficult to master and easy to be lost with scan readers. The essay is short and worth more than scan reading. It carries a laugh or two for those liking irony.