Romy, Yos-

Good example.  Also an example of what happens when power is wielded without checks & balances, by people who are so enamored of a theory that it obscures the real world. 

The Khmer Rough also routinely slaughtered or interned & tortured anyone found wearing glasses, because they believed that glasses were a sign of an attempt to assert status by the intellectual and technical classes.  But the fact is that by middle age, almost all men and probably at least a majority of women require the use of glasses to read and perform other short-distance visual tasks.  That inconvenient fact didn't get in the way of the Khmer Rouge's theory. 

Everyone reading this email is a member of the "intellectual and technical class," even if a large plurality of us are living on working class income or less.  And the vast majority of us are going to live long enough to need glasses.  Fortunately none of us has the power to compel any of us to use words a certain way, even though we can & do argue (as peers) about that.

-G.



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On 13-05-08-Wed 10:21 PM, Romy Ilano wrote:

There is a yin and a yang to everything.

Here are a few examples of the "dark side" of reshaping language... 

I've read a lot of history about the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Cambodian Khmer Rouge... these groups were very interested in reforming a corrupt society, finding new ways of doing things. They are not shining examples but I can say that their intentions started out pure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge_rule_of_Cambodia#Establishing_the_Constitution_of_Democratic_Kampuchea

On the surface, society in Democratic Kampuchea was strictly egalitarian. The Khmer language, like many in Southeast Asia, has a complex system of usages to define speakers' rank and social status. These usages were abandoned. People were encouraged to call each other "friend", or "comrade" (in Khmer, មិត្ដ mitt), and to avoid traditional signs of deference such as bowing or folding the hands in salutation.

Language was transformed in other ways. The Khmer Rouge invented new terms. People were told they must "forge" (lot dam) a new revolutionary character, that they were the "instruments" (opokar) of the Angkar, and that nostalgia for pre-revolutionary times (chheu satek arom, or "memory sickness") could result in their receiving Angkar's "invitation" to be deindustrialised and to live in a concentration camp.

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