"George Orwell's contention was that it is a sure sign of trouble when things can no longer be called by their right names and described in plain, forthright speech"
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Orwell gets invoked whenever people feel language slipping its moorings, but Lasch is doing something sharper than generic nostalgia for plain talk. He’s pointing to a political weather report: when a culture loses the ability to name things plainly, it’s not just a stylistic problem, it’s an early warning system for institutional decay. “Sure sign of trouble” frames euphemism and jargon as symptoms, not causes - the verbal equivalent of smoke in the hallway.
Lasch, a historian of American culture’s habits and hypocrisies, is also quietly indicting the professional-managerial instinct to launder reality through expertise. “Right names” isn’t about pedantic correctness; it’s about moral clarity. If unemployment becomes “labor market dislocation,” if war becomes “kinetic action,” if censorship becomes “content moderation,” the words don’t merely soften the blow - they reorganize responsibility. Someone did something. Someone benefits. The linguistic fog makes those actors harder to see.
The Orwell reference matters because Orwell treated political prose as a kind of anesthetic: abstractions that let ordinary people consent to cruelty or incompetence without feeling the full force of it. Lasch borrows that diagnosis to suggest a broader cultural rot: elites and institutions protect themselves by making speech less legible, while citizens lose the shared vocabulary needed for democratic argument.
The subtext is a challenge, not a lament. Plain speech is portrayed as civic infrastructure. When it collapses, what follows isn’t just misunderstanding, but governable confusion.
Lasch, a historian of American culture’s habits and hypocrisies, is also quietly indicting the professional-managerial instinct to launder reality through expertise. “Right names” isn’t about pedantic correctness; it’s about moral clarity. If unemployment becomes “labor market dislocation,” if war becomes “kinetic action,” if censorship becomes “content moderation,” the words don’t merely soften the blow - they reorganize responsibility. Someone did something. Someone benefits. The linguistic fog makes those actors harder to see.
The Orwell reference matters because Orwell treated political prose as a kind of anesthetic: abstractions that let ordinary people consent to cruelty or incompetence without feeling the full force of it. Lasch borrows that diagnosis to suggest a broader cultural rot: elites and institutions protect themselves by making speech less legible, while citizens lose the shared vocabulary needed for democratic argument.
The subtext is a challenge, not a lament. Plain speech is portrayed as civic infrastructure. When it collapses, what follows isn’t just misunderstanding, but governable confusion.
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