I have have had my fill of the way the media, pundits, on air personalities, and politicians repeat certain words/terms without any hesitation. The English language has hundreds of thousands of words in it surely we do not have to re-use terms such as, pivot, branding, move to the center, etc.
Between that and journalists strongly held belief that the term "lie" is verboten really burns my biscuits! Evidently, you must know the original speaker's intent before you can impute whether it is a lie. That irks the hell out of me. Why? Because sometimes reality makes it clearly evident that an actor has given demonstrably false statements. That is not always the case, but take the following as examples:
Senator McCain denying that he never said, "....he did not understand the economy."?
Senator Obama's claim that he has not changed his position on the recently passed FISA amendment? Well I will leave that question to the estimable Glenn Greenwald, he sums up the mendacity quite well, and better then I.
But I digress. We need to use some new words! There is so much rich and florid language to draw on, specially considering how many things we should be angered by. Considering my previous examples I think these terms are well timed and appropriate. So my offerings for this and last week are:
Calumny and Perfidy
Just to reiterate, they are acutely appropriate for the behavior that we have seen thus far in the presidential race as well as over the last 7 years. So use them in a sentence. Write a pretty letter. Pen a lengthy missive to the editor. Just do something to help our journalist and media friends out.
-cheers
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