PJ Media
David Solway
June 25, 2018
As a poet and essayist, I have always been interested in the power of the phrase: the epithet, the slogan, the aphorism, the idiom, the cliché, the qualifier, the tag, the label, the title and the name. Of course, such locutions often carry neutral implications as mere designators, or may generate what Vance Packard called “hidden persuaders,†some of which can be quite clever and even impressive. For example, the FedEx logo. The company acronym contains a hidden symbol which one can glimpse with a little attention, namely, the white-space arrow implying forward motion between the concluding "E" and the lower case "x."
The problem is, as we should all be aware, that phrases may also be used for nefarious purposes, insinuating themselves into the mind as signifiers for non-existent “realities†or as de facto claims that are wholly fraudulent. The names of many totalitarian dictatorships bear misnomers like “Democratic†or “Republic†or “Free,†which fool only the credulous and the partisan. Does an area of the Pacific Ocean belong to China because it is called the South China Sea?
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