Tumbrils and the English Language
As George Orwell pointed out more than half a century ago, the storehouse of the English language occasionally needs a good sweep. In the hands of excited, careless or tired writers, words and phrases that once were new or uniquely descriptive become so overused that they seem to threaten the integrity of the language itself. With a broom (or rather, cartwheel) in hand, CounterPunch editor Alexander Cockburn attempts a cleaning.
As George Orwell pointed out more than half a century ago, the storehouse of the English language occasionally needs a good sweep. In the hands of excited, careless or tired writers, words and phrases that once were new or uniquely descriptive become so overused that they seem to threaten the integrity of the language itself. With a broom (or rather, cartwheel) in hand, CounterPunch editor Alexander Cockburn attempts a cleaning. –ARK
Wait, before you go…Alexander Cockburn at Creators:
Next up: “iconic.” I trip over this golly-gee epithet 30 times a day. No warrant for its arrest is necessary, nor benefit of counsel or trial. Off to the tumbrils, arm in arm with “narrative.” These days everyone has a narrative — an earnest word originally recruited, I believe, by anthropologists. So we read “according to the Pentagon’s narrative…” Why not use some more energetic formulation, such as “According to the patent nonsense minted by the Pentagon’s press office…”? Suddenly, we’re surrounded by “narratives,” all endowed with equal status. Into the tumbrils with it.
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CounterPunch, the muckraking political newsletter founded in 1994 by investigative journalist Jeffrey St. Clair and recently deceased iconoclast Alexander Cockburn, has paid a “savage price” for maintaining its deeply critical view of President Obama during the 2012 presidential campaign season.
Fashion, tips for surviving a police encounter, and why we might all be better off when the American empire crumbles are among the subjects the late CounterPunch editor Alexander Cockburn rapped about in a conversation in the Deep South sometime during the summer of 2006.
He could be infuriating in his lust for truth and social justice, but no serious student of our time can deny Alexander Cockburn’s importance as one of the most principled and insightful political journalists of the past half-century.
Alexander Cockburn, editor of the political newsletter CounterPunch, lost a two-year battle against cancer when he died in Germany on Friday night.
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