New Labour, Labouring New Words.

Language evolves, as even Dr. Johnson had to admit, but it can also end up a patient on Procrustes' Bed, suffering the tortures of the damned to make it conform to fashions even starving clothes models would object to undergoing. Language starved and tortured, stretched and chopped for the sake of conforming to the latest fashion, that is language that oppresses and enslaves rather than language that communicates and frees minds and opens broad and open avenues through otherwise impenetrable confusions. Language hunted down, confined in dark seminar rooms, tied up and tortured to confess and conform to the fashion of this day's orthodoxy, language gutted of sense and wisdom and meaning is the Newspeak we skirt around this day from fear of the fashion police. No evolution of language, but a daily ripping and tearing till the words that remain are little more than the echoes of flapping rags upon a stick.

"Community" is not what it means but how we use it as a word. Today. Tomorrow it might fall out of fashion, someone finding it disrespectful and X-ophobic. Then we'll cripple it, toss it out, and find some new word, some other fine, upstanding word to cloak in the emperor's new clothes.

"Community." Use it while you still can, before someone sues you for doing so. And when you're done, "Give back to the community."
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The grievance community


David Thompson has written scathingly about the grievance culture. Now Jeff Radall in The Telegraph scoffs at the "grievance community":

Of all the weasel words that have crept into common usage since New Labour swept to power 10 years ago, few grate more acutely than "community", a cornerstone of the Left's warped lexicon.


Used in a certain way, it is particularly popular with social workers, charity organisers, bleeding-heart commentators, human rights lawyers, diversity officers and equal opportunities administrators...

Moaners, whingers, agitators and those with axes to grind, who insist on being portrayed as permanently oppressed or, at the very least, disadvantaged, flourish in identifiable "communities". As an aggregate of human dissatisfaction, a self-perpetuating, self-pitying collective that rejects integration with the rest of us, they are "the grievance community".

[Please continue at link below.]

Posted on 4:33 AM by Mary Jackson

http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_direct_link.cfm?blog_id=6316

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Thank you, Mary.