An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:
Orwell lists ‘foolishness’, words become ‘ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish’. Therefore, is PM Lee indirectly admitting to ‘foolishness’ amongst his administration?
As an e.g., consider his admission of lack of 20/20 foresight resulting in once world-leading services/products (say, train services & HDB prices) becoming a curse to citizens the last decade. Instead of attacking the root causes of over-population and high land prices, they work to assuage the symptoms. Hence, the language to play up the ‘truth’ of their (stop-gap) solutions – but burying, never addressing the root causes.
Adding to ‘foolishness’ would be greed masquerading as GDP growth at all cost. It’s the economy, stupid – and nothing much else. Everything else is secondary, if it ever mattered at all. Hence, the purpose becomes to communicate, promote the golden calf as the only dance in town. All other music must follow therefrom. No growth, no go for other programmes. Nope, cannot touch bits of what’s saved, never mind the raining all about us.
Truthiness From Form
Nowadays, technology and higher literacy drive the demand for openness, if not the truth. But ‘you can’t handle the truth’, more like ‘our truth’ is what PM Lee & colleagues must think. So, in place of openness/truth, PAP gives us ‘truthiness’ (the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true).
Here’s a sampling; ‘CPF is your money’, ‘constructive politics’, ‘flip flop’, ‘here’s $10,000, $1,000 buys you a 3-room flat’ etc. All sounding like the truth that they should – but are ‘not necessarily true’.
But the words that take the cake: PM Lee at the National Day Rally, 14 Aug 2011, ‘we are putting Singaporeans first’…. being overridden by his junior colleague, a senior minister of state (manpower), Amy Khor in parliament, 27 May 2014 ‘“Singaporeans first” will not benefit the economy in the long term’.
The Leader himself seems to have missed the forest for the trees....
http://2econdsight.wordpress.com/201...s-of-language/
Click here to view the whole thread at www.sammyboy.com.
23-06-2014, 10:50 PM
Govt to use simple language to evade or divert, obfuscate, cover-up, talk-up?
