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In what passes for modern political ‘discourse’ in America, the lexicon of English is being grossly perverted in a most Orwellian way. Words such as ‘elite’, ‘liberate’ and ‘liberal’ have acquired very negative connotations and others such as ‘democracy’ and phrases such as ‘free market’ and 'moral authority', are used to convey meanings antonymous to their traditional definitions.
Take the word ‘intelligence’.
Please.
The way that it is bandied about in military reports and commentary regarding the illegal war in Iraq, (e.g. ‘insufficient intelligence’, ‘lack of credible intelligence’, ‘intelligence gap’, ‘intelligence gathering’) one might swear that the term no longer denotes the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge or the faculty of thought and reason or (laughingly) superior powers of mind. Otherwise, one might then wonder why smarter people aren’t in charge of these “fragile and reversible” operations if ‘lack of intelligence’ plays such a key factor in the situation in (fill in the blank).
Processing such conventional misuse of the English lexicon to fit such extremely narrow political context contributes to cognitive dissonance and the rising uncontrollable urge to throttle someone.
