Last week I was packing away a wooly shawl I had bought at a bargain price when I noticed its tag: “Made in Peru.” My pulse quickened. Wooly things made in Peru are often made of expensive alpaca wool! Maybe I had more of a bargain than I bargained for!
But on closer inspection, the label said, “Genuine Virgin Acrylic.” It was the same thing I’ve seen on the labels of other wooly garments that claim to be “faux wool.”
So what is a virgin acrylic, I wondered. Do acrylics run wild in the mountains of Peru? If two of these virgin acrylics “got together” and had a baby, could they be called “virgin” acrylics anymore? Isn’t acrylic just an inexpensive man-made fiber?
I’ve also bought jackets made of “genuine faux leather.” Faux is a fancy-sounding French word for fake, meaning in this case “plastic.” So “genuine faux” means really fake, no leather in it.
I had a similar experience buying a car a couple of weeks ago. Before the finance guy would even take the check that I thrust at him so I could go home or listen to my assurance that I don’t finance cars, he insisted that I listen to his spiel on adding an extended warranty to the car’s already exorbitant price.
He began, “I’m going to give you the opportunity to save thousands of dollars on an extended warranty— oh, but I can’t call it an extended warranty,” he whispered conspiratorially. “ Then what is it? I asked. Is it not extended or not a warranty?”
He never would tell me what this “opportunity” was called. But what it seemed to be was an “opportunity” to spend about $6,500 for something that might not happen or might not happen for an extended period. He made it sound exciting, but I turned it down since I seldom buy things that can’t be identified.
The purpose of language is to communicate truth clearly. But obviously, as the world turns more selfish, language has become just another tool to muddy the waters and either confuse people or lie to them to get the results the communicator wants.
Politicians use the technique of language obfuscation (a fancy word for “muddy the waters”) to get us to vote for certain candidates and either support or reject certain proposals. The Marxist Biden administration were experts in this language confusion for the purpose of moving America toward socialism.
Remember how Biden’s Economic Recovery Act and his Inflation Reduction Act were presented as steps to revive the economy and cut inflation for the average American? About the only thing I saw revived was the greed of people who were getting Covid supplement checks and still refuse to work today, and the greed of people who have gotten used to higher profits on goods and refuse to cut prices to a reasonable level. The only recovery I’ve seen has come from the steps President Trump is taking to try to restore the country’s economy.
The Biden administration was also expert in the art of attaching “hate words” to anyone they wanted to cast in a negative light. So everyone who opposed them was either “Hitler,” a racist, a homophobe, or a misogynist. Of course, the ones practicing Hitler’s tactics were the Democrats, but the truth doesn’t count in language manipulation. Their language was a lie and a projection of their own tactics onto others. It only works with people who don’t know or refuse to learn the truth.
And remember how many times we were told that Biden was “perfectly fit” to be president? Some voters took that to mean he was healthy enough to run the biggest government in the world. In reality, he never was.
Recent disclosures prove that he had cancer as early as 2021 and dementia had already begun. He was “perfectly fit,” all right, to sit in a chair, look presidential, and let the Marxist puppet masters run the government, which is the reason his party chose him as their candidate.
The blame for language confusion cuts two ways— to the language twister who is trying to peddle a lie (“genuine acrylic”) and to the person who accepts the language he hears without analyzing it (“Trump is the next Hitler!”) or who doesn’t know much about language at all. Those are the ones the twisters are counting on — “We can use certain words on you to make you do as we want.” So if you are lazy, disinterested or just accept everything you hear without analyzing it, you will continue to be fooled. The left is still out there obfuscating the truth with words.
My English students used to ask why they couldn’t just write like they wanted to. “Everybody knows what I’m talking about. I don’t have to use good grammar,” they’d assure me.
If you start accepting illogical, vague or unclear language, you’re on the way to a slow deterioration into communication chaos, which is where the left wants us to be. We’re too close to that already.
