“The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech and practically construct them into syntax.”

A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle talks of how much of the language used in our modern political discourse threatens the very principles of liberty that our nation and Constitution is founded upon – indeed our destiny as a nation.

When language is too often used to deceive and confuse, to say what we do not entirely mean, to marginalize thought and opinion, it eventually erodes the ability to truly understand or believe anything that is said. Faith in government and our leaders – and, perhaps, in anything at all – falls victim to apathy, ignorance, and disbelief. If we can’t be sure if any particular iteration is true, then how can we believe if anything is true? If what is said is actually intended to obfuscate instead of inform, then how are we to truly understand the issues of our day and the right course of action in solving the problems we face?

The article quoted the essay Politics and the English Language by George Orwell:
“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”…
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were to long words or exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink”.

In making an analogy between constitutions and language as frameworks upon which humans endeavor to live in civilized society, Thomas Paine understood that the two are inexorably intertwined, and that the degradation of one was at the peril of the other.