Prolegomenon to Any Future Metalanguage
or, "Why Build a New Democratic Language? The FAQ"What are we doing here?
We are creating a new Democratic language. With this language, we will state our position as liberal democrats.
Why?
Because people "think" in words.
If we think in the words of the neocon movement, facts become distorted. It becomes "up and down votes" instead of "good or bad judges."
That's sort of a weak point, isn't it?
Not at all. How we talk changes how we understand and gerenally think about the world around us. If America continues it's ever increasing usage of theocratic social conservatives' "neospeak," liberal thought will be exterminated at the level of ganglia.
There's a lot of academic work to back this up. Benjamin Lee Whorf wrote in 1956 that, "users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world."
A valuable nugget, but hard to understand (sort of like today's Democrats). Basically, it says "Two people with different languages will comprehend given evidence differently from one another."
What on earth do we do with this knowledge?
We teach people to speak our language, by rebuilding it to be as clear, concise, irrefutable and self-evident as possible. We carefully introduce this new language to ensure maximal absorption.
Will you please rant a little?
John Kerry was incomprehensible, and [thus] completely unclear as to where he stood. That was bad.
Most politicians are like that, however, so it's not just Kerry.
W. speaks like an advanced fourth grader, so everybody understands him, even if his actual arrangement of words rivals Yoda on a martini binge.
OK, enough ranting!
Sorry. Last thought: Dean was much more clear, but not careful enough. If he had spoken a consistent language, that would have structured his approach at such a fundamental level that it would have been harder to flip out so often in public. (Note: "Aiiargh!" is not to be included in any future metalanguage).
posted at 2:39 PM Permalink
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