In 1946, George Orwell wrote “Politics and the English Language” and one of the main points made is that when authorities seek to be dishonest, they often obscure the language. Orwell likened this to the defensive spraying of ink from a cuttlefish, so that it can hide behind the obscurity.
Image Attribution
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sepia_officinalis_modell.jpg
Hans Dappen, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
And here is the quote, in context, from Orwell:
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
Notice how he mentions the gap between the real aims of political leaders and the declared aims. When leaders want bad things, they try to introduce confusion by using names and terms that are unclear or foreign to most people.
A funny thing happened to me after typing into the search bar this question:
Do I need the new COVID booster?
I got a story about the booster from the popular press, and the following is an excerpt of it, with emphasis added:
Unlike the last round of boosters, the updated mRNA vaccines are monovalent, which means they target a single variant. The previous booster rolled out last fall was bivalent, meaning it included two strains — the original SARS-CoV-2 virus and the omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants, says Mulligan. The bivalent vaccine is no longer authorized by the FDA, the CDC said.
In recent months, the XBB.1.5 subvariant targeted in the updated vaccine has been overtaken by new strains including HV.1, the EG.5 or "Eris" subvariant, F.L.1.5.1 (dubbed "Fornax"), and XBB.1.16 or "Arcturus" — which are all descendants of the omicron XBB lineage and close relatives of XBB.1.5, TODAY.com reported previously.
Fortunately, the updated vaccines are expected to provide good protection against the variants currently circulating, the FDA said.
This summer, a highly mutated new variant called BA.2.86 or “Pirola” gained global attention after health experts predicted it may be better able to bypass immunity from vaccination and prior infection. However, new data suggests that BA.2.86 may not be as immune-evasive as initially thought, and that the updated COVID shots will likely still be effective against the mutated strain.
In case you didn’t catch all of them, that’s 12 different names for one respiratory virus, in 4 short paragraphs (3 new names per paragraph). Keep in mind that this article in the lay media was not about the variants, themselves, it was about the booster shots.
And it gave 12 different names for people to try to figure out. This is evidence that political leaders are being “insincere” about COVID and that their real aims differ from their declared aims — as they hide behind the jargon and hope that the public remains confused.
Reference
[George Orwell writing about the methods leaders use when lying to the public] — Politics and the English Language. George Orwell – 1946. https://personal.utdallas.edu/~aria/research/resources/orwell.pdf
[news article that gives 12 different names for COVID] — Today. Do I need the new COVID booster? Eligibility, side effects, cost and more. https://www.msn.com/en-au/health/medical/do-i-need-the-new-covid-booster-eligibility-side-effects-cost-and-more/ar-AA1gCHoR