The Spinspeak Letter

Verbal star of the 2012 election campaign spin-go-round is unquestionably the word “fair” which contemporary politics has rendered meaningless.

Some examples:

 Fair wage = higher salaries and pensions for government workers whose compensation already outstrips  the private sector.

 Fair day’s work = No more than six hours a day, four days a week with 20 holidays, 30 sick days, 20 personal business days  and six weeks vacation – a package pioneered in France and Greece.

 Fair share = Higher taxes for the most productive elements of society.

As the witches once warned Macbeth:

Fair is foul and foul is fair

Hover through the fog and filthy air

Back in days of yore when kings had gout from overeating, merry-making and much drink and angry paupers with anarchist leanings and bombs  were actually poor, the phrase “class warfare”  had some meaning.

No longer.

Today any rogue or roguette can be a multi-millionaire TV king or queen for at least a fortnight  and the  “permanent poor” have cars, Ipads, and plastic food stamp cards.

None of this impinges on our  spinspeaking class warrior snollygosters who have removed all class from class warfare with class- warefarespeak.

Here is a class-warfarespeak sampler:

fat cats = rich, greedy Wall Street crooks who will remain mostly unnamed in case they want to make a campaign contribution to the speaker.

few at the top =  multi-millionaire and billionaire wastrel, depraved  sons and daughters of dead multi-millionaires and billionaires who made their money by stealing from the workers who didn’t become millionaires and billionaires.

middle class = formerly hard-working people mostly private sector seeking to improve their lot from generation to generation through their talent; now,  public sector employees seeking to improve their lot by milking the hard-workers in the private sector.

their fair share = the 63 percent of the cost a bankrupt government that “the rich” are not already supporting.

millionaires and billionaires = bad guy, malodorous definition of anyone making more than $200,000 a year except for members of the political class and their unctuous polyps.

A handy voter’s guide to current economic spinspeak:

class warfare = reverse doubletalk  for pretending to protect the “middle class” by advocating ever popular “soak the rich” tax programs that eventually “soak”
everyone not on food stamps.

unexpected = I-am-shocked-shocked  spin for who would have ever thought that  our stupid failed policies would result in further disaster.

millionaires and billionaires  (see the rich) =  forked-tongue talk for diving into poverty anyone in what used to be called the upper middle class.

fair share = fliptalk for as much of all your money as we can get our hands on.

underlying social contract = elitist academic Trojanhorse-talk  for  the
envy-dripping belief that anyone who has more money than I do must have inherited it,  stolen it or cheated some peasant out of it  and society demands that it be confiscated and redistributed.

In the good,  really old old days in Europe when the big long ships with the dragons up front arrived for a little looting, murder and general rapine no one was in any doubt
that the rowdy, red-haired rowers with the horns on their hats  were Vikings.

Same goes when the peasants heard in the night  a few thousand horses coming their way. They knew immediately  that the guys with the yellow skin and slanty eyes  riding those ponies were Mongols. And their arrival was decidedly not good news.

But, as the memorial services for the 10^th anniversary of 9/11 and its 24-hour coverage by the Wussiland  media made clear , it was a terrible, sad event but  there was scant indication of who was the enemy.

Generally, the popular politically correct spinspeak identified the enemy as simply anonymous “terrorists ” or “terrorist extremists.” Presumably a terrorist extremist is much worse than a plain vanilla  terrorist, the sort who possibly those who use dirty knives for decapitations. But neither appellation tells you whom to avoid in dark
alleys.

The Islamists (whomever they may be) don’t seem to have this problem.

Few verbalisms get moth-eaten faster than the self-proclaimed
congratulatory phrase.

Here are two:

Smartest person in the room = This once was Thomas Jefferson.
Now it’s someone who sits around looking superior while saying NOTHING of detailed
substance.

Only adult in the room = Maybe George Washington or Benjamin
Franklin, not the guy with the smartass smirk who waits to agree to whatever is
agreed.

Sound the tocsin.  Another fine word has been sucked into meaninglessness in  the Big Spinspeak Blender. This time the word is distraction.

A distraction is defined as something that turns  ones attention away from whatever one happens to be doing or thinking.  Often the something is an amusement or a
telephone call.   Often distraction is described as minor as in: The barking dog distracted us during the movie.  Normally, the something is not a tornado as in: We were distracted by the tornado and had to postpone the croquet game.

Therefore, distraction became forked-tonguetalk when Congressman Anthony Weiner said he was resigning because of the hullabaloo over his penchant for tweeting pictures of his crotch to young women had become a distraction.

The spin, of course, was gratefully  picked up by the growing legion of Democrat pols who know the difference between a barking dog and a 500-pound smelly gorilla.

Clichés by definition  are tired and old. Clichés lack imagination and wit. Clichés remind one of  stale vaudeville jokes.

But clichés have their uses.  No dictionary or interpreter is needed.  Your meaning is clear even to room temperature IQ audiences.  Clichés  can even be employed artfully to enrich satire.

However, when used repeatedly as obvious spinspeak, a cliché wilts and dies.

A prime example is the  talking point  “bump in the road”  overexposed by the Obama Administration and its fellow travelers to downplay a seemingly endless 9.1 percent unemployment level.

The noun “bump” is a very old  and rather nice word dating back to the l6th Century. It means protuberance, a lump  or swelling such as bump on a log or bump on the head.  Obviously such a bump is a small matter that can be overcome with an ice pack or easily driven around or over; a brief obstacle soon chuckled about over a beer.

That’s what the proclaimers of bump in the road  want you to think when you keep facing  9.1 percent continuing unemployment: It’s a temporary minor concern.  But there are  millions of  unemployed blocked by this “bump.”   That’s why “bump in the road” is doomed as a cliché and is being  relegated to the spinspeak garbage pail of economic humbug.

The public problems of Congressman Anthony  Weiner (D-NY),  master of Tweetporn, again brings to light the vacuity of three threadbare  spinspeak biggies – old chestnuts all.

I take full responsibility =  bravebabble for:  yes I did it but don’t expect me to suffer any consequences such as resigning my office, compensating anyone with hard cash, or changing my interesting ways.

I am sorry = copout talk  (even with tears) for:  what I am really sorry about is that you caught me.

I apologize = fuzzball  for:  see how contrite I am;  but really for:  OK I said it, I said it, now  stop victimizing me, I’m only human, you know; let’s get on with the important stuff.

More spinspeak beclouding the evolving soap opera saga of now former IMF Director Dominique Strauss-Khan (DSK) and the chambermaid:

exception sexuelle (sexual exception) = French corporatespeak for it is OK for important men to be “hot rabbits.”

consensual = cosmeticspeak that despite the facts insists that “she was asking for it.”

trapped = conspiracyspeak for blatant creation of fictional explanations of what clearly occurred.  An imaginative form of denialspeak.

a friend to women = Gallic faux signal for someone the boys at the bar call “le lapin chaud.”

The alleged High Noon Hotel Caper of IMF Director Dominique Strauss-Khan in New York is already making rich contributions to the spinspeak phyla, sexcrimetalk.

M. Strauss-Khan, an expected candidate for President of France, is charged among other things with trying to rape and then “sexually abusing”  a chambermaid who entered his $3,000-a-night suite to clean it.  

sexual abuse = politically correct nicespeak for forced fellatio, bondage and other similar entertainments.

not a flight risk = forked-tonguetalk for there is no risk in letting him out on bail when, as the judge noted, the alleged perp was taken off a plane minutes before it took off for Paris.

a reputation for liking woman = cop-out talk for just a guy who likes girls. Strauss-Khan is widely reported to have an alarming record of womanizing;  described by one object of his fancy as a “rutting chimpanzee,” by others as a “chaud lapin” (hot rabbit)..

serious error of judgment = cozytalk for hoping that admission of error will make outrageous, unacceptable behavior okey dokey, at worst Gallic exuberance.

Spinspeak Paris street comment reported in the Wall Street Journal: “This is not working out well for Strauss-Kahn.”