George Orwell, Call Your Office

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” George Orwell reminds us in his classic essay “Politics and the English Language.”  (By the way, I typically assign students to read this essay in every course I teach, regardless of the subject.  Not only is it a good aid to writing, but it also indirectly undermines a lot of political correctness.)

This is preface to noting Jay Leno’s observation last night about the news that the Associated Press is going to discontinue using the term “illegal immigrants.”  Leno has the ideal substitute for AP:

Rather puts me in the frame of mind to recall an old George Carlin routine about how “shell shock” had slowly yielded to “post-traumatic stress disorder”:

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