Abstract
MOST PEOPLE don't take words very seriously. Challenge their use of them and they'll say: Well, it's just a question of semantics. Then they'll wander off to sip their Harvey Wallbangers in pleasanter company. But a small band of fanatics, obsessed wvith their political grudges, have set in motion the great euphemism hunt. With few exceptions they pursue government doublespeak with the ardor of heretic and witch hunters. From Edwin Newvman's Strictly Speaking and Mario Pei's Doublespeak in America to Stefan Kanfer's Words from Watergate and Neil Postman's Language in America, the approach has been semantic taxonomy of a very naive though bellicose kind. The critic sets up two categories: reality words and euphemisms. He then makes sorties into bureaucratic sorting the captured words of Nixon and his men into the boxes on his desk: reality words-good, euphemismsbad. George Orwell is the euphemism-raider's high priest. If thought corrupts language, Terence Moran quotes Orwell, language can also corrupt thought. Too often the moralist seeks to expose these
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