The English Language is a constantly evolving thing. Having no official governing body, it tends to do so haphazzardly (which is, in the end, a good thing). Efforts to enforce controls on the language (see Newspeak in Orwell’s 1984, or “politically correct” speech on any college campus) are, at their heart, efforts to control thought.
I am brought to these ruminations today by an essay from Hot Air’s Green Room:
The Eff Word
Fascism
By Doctor Zero
HotAirIt’s the ultimate political epithet, the atomic blast that ends calm and measured debate. This makes those who seek to be reasonable and persuasive understandably reluctant to use the word… and those who aren’t interested in either reason or persuasion eager to hurl it at their opponents. There is nothing surprising about the visceral emotions conjured by the mention of its name. The history of fascism is written in the blood of innocents, on a scale that challenges the limits of human imagination.
Indeed it is. That it should be so is something of an irony of history. Fascism is without question an ideology whose history is written in blood. Yet for all its manifest evils, Facism is not the most blood soaked ideology in history. That distinction belongs to Communism, which killed nearly two orders of magnitude more innocents in the 20th century.