Comments on: Fun with Words

By: BlahBlahBlah

BlahBlahBlah — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 07:25:34 +0000

“What a distortion of a good word!” Distortion you say, I’m sure you have used that word in it’s current context and felt it was good to suit your need. The word has changed but saying it’s distorted implies it has degraded, and in most cases words change but why is the original always better? I see this and in some cases justified and in others people are just well…………..

By: damask-rose

damask-rose — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 19:18:15 +0000

I particularly liked your analysis of the word ‘propaganda’. I had just read wikipedias definition and was shocked that it described the word as meaning “to use lies and deception” to persuade the masses of one’s (usually evil) veiwpoint. Where did they get that from? What a distortion of a good word!

By: SG

SG — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 07:19:27 +0000

You probably thought decimation meant 90% destruction BECAUSE it is so commonly mixed up with devastation.
As for the mandate thing, this is a case of a word being distorted for political purposes, and that usage doesn’t pass our global test of appearing in the dictionary yet. Of course it probably IS in some dictionary somewhere, but you gotta have SOME standards.
Anyhow, as we said, a mandate could conceivably be claimed in a single-issue election– and single-issue elections tend to be pretty one-sided. The last such we can recall was Ford’s defeat over the Nixon fiasco. We don’t recall a single issue election where the victor referred to his win as a mandate.
The real problem with Bush’s claiming a mandate is that no single “issue” represented the majority of opinion within either side. Maybe 20% of Bush voters are religious conservatives who voted for him because of the religious issues, so even if he did receive a majority of the vote there’s no way he can claim that the majority endorses that point of view. Well, wait a minute. Of course he can CLAIM a mandate– but we shouldn’t let him get away with it. Don’t forget that this is a man who said “If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.”

By: bean

bean — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 07:14:26 +0000

funny, I always thought “decimate” meant to reduce something to one-tenth…go figure. The “mandate” thing has been wacky, though…a political mandate exists, imho, when a candidate gets an unusually large, or lopsided, victory…a squeaker is never a mandate.