The Left's use of neologisms and euphemisms and the focus on reinterpreting language is not new. In reading Proctor's book, The Nazi War on Cancer, we note:
The doublespeak of totalitarian regimes is legendary Nazi Germany is full of words cloaked in careful disguises, political "euphemisms" designed not to soften a blow but to deceive. Joseph Goebbels was the master of this art, barring words like sabotage and assassination that, from their very utterance, might give people the wrong kind of ideas:
In wartime one should not speak of assassination either in a negative or an affirmative sense. There are certain words from which we should shrink as the devil does from Holy Water; among these are, for instance, the words "sabotage" and "assassination." One must not permit such terms to become part and parcel of everyday slang.
Some examples are amusing: Germans were not supposed to use the traditional expression "catastrophe aid" but rather the more upbeat "first aid"; also barred was any media use of the expression "Yellow Peril," in deference to the Japanese. There are efforts to modernize medical discourse: the shift from "cripple" (Kriippel) to "handicapped" (Behinderte) occurs in this period, for example, as does the shift from idiot and asylum to retarded and clinic. Strange as it may seem, both of these latter terms were introduced in the early 1940s by physicians orchestrating the "euthanasia" operation. The term "handicapped" (Behinderte), for example, was first used in 1940 by physicians and bureaucrats organizing the murder of the physically and mentally handicapped. Genocide was not a matter of public discourse (the word had not yet even been coined), so "special treatment" (Sonderbehandlung) became one of many code words for murder, along with Abtransport, Desinfektion, Einschldferung, Endlosung, Erlosung, Euthanasie, Evakuierung, Gnadentod, Judenaktion, Liquidation, Reinigung, Selektion, Vergasung, Vernichtung, and so forth, ad nauseam. The Nazis ended up with as many words for murder as Eskimos (purportedly) have for snow.
Thus, this use of "proper" words has an interesting provenance that may allow one to see where such playing with language leads.
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