Words Make a Difference

Calling an unborn human a “fetus” or “product of conception” but not a “baby” or “person” changes people’s perceptions of unborn human’s value and makes abortion more permissible.

Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, pg.210

Control of the Language Needed by LEFTISTS

Language determines the realities we attend to. If certain words fall into desuetude, it means that certain realities have dropped from our attention as well. Words, for example, such as valor, nobility, honor, sanctity, chastity, and purity hang on to life but seem to be written in the past tense, as though the realities they refer to are remnants of some dim history. Such words appear rarely, if at all, in the vocabulary of social scientists or in the popular media. Other, more “relevant” words have edged them aside. For every purity that gets to print, there are a hundred needs, naturals, and sexuals to crowd them out.

What is perhaps most effective about such a technique is that it requires no confrontation. It does not deny the other realities. It by-passes them the way a superhighway bypasses a village so that after a while people forget that the village is there.

William Kirk Kilpatrick, Psychological Seduction: The Failure of Modern Psychology, pg.127-128

See a current example.

Redefining Freedom

Many intellectuals, living in the safety and comfort of free societies, have found it expedient to redefine freedom, so that an expansion of government determination of economic outcomes, through an expansion of government compulsion, is not seen as a trade-off of freedom, as conveniently redefined.

In the world of words, the hardest facts can be made to vanish into thin air by a clever catchword or soaring rhetoric. In a public discourse where slogans and images have too often replaced facts and logic, words have indeed become for some what Hobbes called them, centuries ago— the money of fools, often counterfeit money created by clever people. Our educational system, which might have been expected to develop students’ ability to “cross-examine the facts,” as the great economist Alfred Marshall once put it, has itself become one of the fountainheads of insinuations and obfuscations. 

Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities, pg.148-149.