The U.S. government and corporations have raised distorting words and destroying the language to an art form. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:
Language is as much (and arguably more effective) a weapon than knives or guns – because weaponized language effectively disarms people. It alters their thinking by getting them to think away from what the person wielding the word weapons doesn’t want them to think about.
I cam across a fine example of weaponized language legerdemain just yesterday when I tried to post a link to one of my articles on what’s still Twitter but now clumsily styled “X” (in order to cause you to believe it is not the same old Twitter). Before Twitter/X would let me post the link, it presented me with a pop-up (the screenshot accompanies this article) that assured me “You’re in control.”
It then went on to tell me that I could exercise this “control” by choosing to be assaulted by “personalized ads” or “less relevant ads.”
But not no ads.
Over that, I have no control.
Which – as such – is fine in the sense that Twitter/X, being a commercial platform, has every right to pester the people who choose to use its service with ads. No one is forced to use TwitterX and if that is the price of using the service offered by Twitter/X, so be it. I understand and agree with the axiom that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But spare us the cloying insipidity of cooing to us that we are “in control.” It conjures affront similar to that expressed by the Marquis of Montrose in the movie, Rob Roy to his villainous underling, Archie. The latter attempts to wheedle Montrose with a similarly cloying cooing about some dirty business he was involved in. Montrose wheels around on him in fury and says:
Do you take me entirely for a whig (that is, an idiot)?
Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.
Joseph Stalin