WayOfTheBern

Caelian

Je vais très bien, merci, je vous en prie.

My favorite Jean-Luc Godard film is his dystopian SF neo-noir Alphaville (1965). One of the themes is manipulation of language by the government. Hotel rooms have dictionaries in place of Gideon Bibles so that people can stay up to date with the latest meanings of words.

The strange use of language is subtle but disconcerting. You first hear it when Anna Karina greets Eddie Constantine with the phrase «je vais très bien, merci, je vous en prie» which means "I'm fine, thank you, you're welcome" but all those polite words are strung together so that they lose their individual meanings and the phrase is merely a complicated way of saying "hello".

ageingrockstar

Re the chart that Taibbi references showing the usage of the phrase 'working class' in books over the last two centuries, it struck me how John Lennon's life and career perfectly rode the surge in usage of the term from circa 1940 (Lennon's birth) to its peak in circa 1970 when Lennon published Working Class Hero. Ironically, those 3 decades were good (or at least getting better) years for the working class, and it's been pretty much all downhill for them/us since the mid 70s.

penelopepnortney

Excerpt, much more at the link:

Thanks to a great response last week to an article about Klaus Schwab’s creep-tastic use of the term “transparency,” I’m pressing forward with a Devil’s Dictionary-style lexicographical project, tracking multitudinous dystopian alterations to American political speech.

I absolutely want the list to be a collaboration with Racket/Substack readers, so this and future entries will feature open comments sections. I see this list working best if it also functions as a usage tracker, à la the Oxford English Dictionary. The best gift my father ever gave me was a full OED, a monstrous rack of volumes that still sits devouring space in my house, daring me to look up the earliest recorded use of pecker in the impertinent sense (“1902 FARMER & HENLEY Slang”).

Here cites are important because they allow us to see how a 1966 use of transparency that meant people seeing sins of government turned into a 2023 usage meaning government seeking out the people’s sins. The more completely such changes are tracked, the more damning the lexicon.