"La Paranoia" <rafaminu@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:1189158264.909658.261640@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> In his essay, "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell . . .
> proved a true prophet about Latinate euphemisms, which are still used
today to
> transform an ugly reality into a bloodless abstraction, a "killer"
> into a "terminator."
You seem to have misunderstood twice.
1. English has several words for killer, e.g. executioner (from Latin),
murderer (from Teutonic), assassin (from Persian) and so on.
Consult your thesaurus.
2. In the English language, use of Terminate to mean kill was
an American bureaucratic innovation (apparently of the Central
Intelligence Agency which used "terminate wiith extreme
prejudice" to mean assassinate. This term was then borrowed
into the general language, e.g. used as the title of a Hollywood
science fiction movie Terminator. Thus its current use in
everyday English reflects less of its notional Latin source than
its actual bureaucratic source and entertainment industry
adoption.
> A good method of sounding like a scholar would be, no doubt, learning
> Spanish or Italian.
From mediaeval times until 1970 or 1980, it was generally
accepted that every scholar must have at least a good reading
knowledge of two or more other languages than his mother-tongue.
High school graduation usually required proof by examination of
competence in at least one such language and the PhD degree
required proof of at least two. These qualifications were generally
abandoned late in the 20th century: but the idea survives, that
scholar****p requires competence in languages.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)
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