Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality

by Steven Poole

Book Overview

What do the phrases "pro-life," "intelligent design," and "the war on terror" have in common? Each of them is a name for something that smuggles in a highly charged political opinion. Words and phrases that function in this special way go by many names. Some writers call them "evaluativedescriptive terms." Others talk of "terministic screens" or discuss the way debates are "framed." Author Steven Poole calls them Unspeak . Unspeak represents an attempt...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802118259
• ISBN13: 9780802118257
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: Grove/Atlantic
• Length: 282 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Angry words spoken and explained

Mr Poole is an angry man, he has serious issues with a lot of the abuse of language that is being perpetuated by politicians at the moment. You can almost feel the anger oozing from the edges of this book (I'd recommend something light and fluffy to read after this!). He looks at the propaganda wars being waged at the moment and asks why we aren't asking more questions about it. And he's right. We should be asking more questions, demaning straight answers and not voting the idiots back in when those answers aren't forthcoming. The problem is that people in general are just too lazy, once it doesn't affect them they don't bother to ask the questions, force the issue, demand the answers. That's part of Mr Poole's anger, his inability to change people in general.

Brilliant account of our rulers' lies

In this insightful book, journalist Steven Poole shows how our rulers abuse language to promote and disguise war, torture and corporate interests. Words have consequences: as he observes, a jury deciding whether a crime was murder or manslaughter is not conducting a linguistic exercise. Similarly, when `freedom is on the march' (Bush), governments can describe murderous and illegal invasions as benign `regime change' and `humanitarian intervention'. Poole brilliantly contrasts reality and deceptions across many different areas. The phrase `faith communities' defines the people referred to as united monolithically and for ever by their beliefs. `Human nature' is code for misanthropic pessimism about human affairs, so war is said to symbolise `the depravity of human nature'. On climate change, Greenpeace's chief scientist preferred the frightener `climate meltdown'. Corporations, religious and commercial, use advertising slogans like `Intelligent Design' (more accurately, Implicit Deism), `sound science', `natural' gas and `organic' produce. Operations Merciful Angel (Kosovo), Just Cause (Panama) and Iraqi Freedom - such cute names! - `serviced' targets and `delivered' force packages: hardly killing people at all. NATO's weapons are always `smart' and `surgical'. NATO forces drop sweet little `bomblets' and playful `daisy cutters'. So the inevitable killings of civilians, women and children can only be `tragic mistakes', or not even the slaughter of civilians, women or children: as the US Army spokesman said, "If it's dead and Vietnamese, it's VC." By contrast, the enemy's weapons are nothing less than Weapons of Mass Destruction, with big capital letters, so they are much more frightening than our puny bombers and aircraft carriers and tanks. Bush and Blair's `war on terror' is asymmetric warfare: `we' are fighting a war; `you' are not, so you cannot be prisoners of war, only `enemy combatants' and `terrorist suspects', so `we' can imprison you without trial and torture you. Donald Rumsfeld described as just `abuses' what even the US Army Manual defines as torture - mock executions, sleep deprivation and `stress positions'. The FBI had to admit that what it acknowledged were `torture techniques' had produced `no intelligence of a threat neutralization nature to date'. In English, the torture has been pointless, as well as immoral. Still, our guys sure have fun doing it, so let's not punish them, unless they're silly enough to admit it.

Ferocious, elegant & riveting

I'd recommend Unspeak as: (a) The highest form of escapism - a vital polemic so engagingly and elegantly written that it wipes out everything else you might have been thinking or worrying about when you opened it. Since it has something important to say about most of the most critical wrangles of our time, it is virtuous escapism. (b) A gift to please or flatter any recipient who is or wants to be considered intelligent. *** This is the rarest kind of book that reflects a monumental concentration of thought and creative energy - a striking contrast to most books today, which are written fighting the distractions of the author's other work, or as a "night job". I don't know how Poole pulled off this feat - or if Unspeak actually had the benefit of his undivided attention - but that's the way his book reads. Reviewers who have only skimmed the text are making two serious mistakes in their descriptions of Unspeak. Contrary to what Nick Beard (customer review, below) says, the book is not remotely a magazine article on stilts. True, its big idea, though subtle, can be swiftly summarised as "a style of language that attempts to smuggle in an unspoken argument by insinuation." But the Socratic method can also be shrunk to a nugget, yet learning how Socratic dialogue works requires exposition, examples - and practice. The worse mistake is casting the author as a prisoner of left-wing thinking. In fact, what Poole demonstrates - often with lacerating wit - is that the Left is just as adept at Unspeak's creepy manipulations, as in . . . ** . . . US and UK politicians' use of the word "community" in ways that, on close examination, add up to a "mental anaesthetic, novocaine for the soul." Clinton, says Poole, often "let the word stand alone, using it in a tremblingly phatic way that was emptied of all specific meaning." (Was there ever a better encapsulation of Clintonian rhetoric?) **. . . or . . .an excoriation of a police report about the accidental murder by men in uniform of the Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes - taken for a terrorist without any evidence at all - on a London Underground train in 2005. The report is crammed chock-full with the mentality of Unspeak. Dissecting it, Poole tells us that "[a]ccording to the first theoretician of tragedy, Aristotle, the tragic hero must be doomed by his own tragic error, or hamartia." He continues: "And they were clearly only spectators, since there was no mention of their having killed Menezes, who instead somehow mislaid his health without outside help. Tony Blair subsequently corrected this unfortunate implication with the most passive, no-blame language possible, referring to `the death that has happened,' as though, perhaps, it had been the result of natural causes." Along the way, as Poole tackles language used in discussing laws to control social behaviour, debates about immigration and asylum-seekers, environmental battles, military operations in the Middle East and the polit

A Great Read!

Do you notice that our evil wars and battles always seem to have noble sounding titles? It's not by accident. And author Steven Poole shows us how it's done. How do you justify the killing of innocent women, children and babies? You call them: "collateral damage." Certainly no reasonable person would oppose "Opperation Just Cause, "Operation Restore Hope" or "Operation Iraqi Liberation."

A very important book

This is one of those books I've been waiting for: a calm but clever look at politicians' language. Poole doesn't take what politicians say at face value and then whine about it, and nor does he simply dismiss as lies everything politicians say. Instead, Poole listens carefully to political language to show how meanings are smuggled into certain terms and phrases and, in particular, how these terms or phrases insinuate that people holding an opposing position are wrong (think "Friends of the Earth": you don't support them? Well, then you must be an "Enemy of the Earth"!) The book is full of examples from both sides of the Atlantic, including charged terms like "ethnic cleansing", "terrorist suspect" and "climate change". Even with such important and difficult subject matter, Poole is entertaining as well as convincing. And it doesn't matter what your political bent is because, as Poole shows, no political party has a monopoly on Unspeak. Every journalist and blogger who does not want to be a simple relay between politician and public, or an uncritical purveyor of careful political manipulation, should become familiar with this book. And if you read this book, you will pay attention to news and the blogs in a whole new way.