George Orwell claimed in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” that English was in a bad way: common consensus (which he was satirizing) held “that any struggle against the abuse of ...

How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality By Steven Poole Grove. 282 pp. $23 Steven Poole traverses well-trod terrain in "Unspeak." The abuse and ...

Apparently, some governments, corporations and pressure groups try to avoid saying exactly what they mean. They use language selected for its favourable connotations and make determined efforts to ...

Unspeak by Steven Poole 288pp, Little, Brown, £9.99 The use and abuse of words is an endlessly fascinating subject to anyone interested in communications, and the 30 pages' worth of reference notes - ...

Politicians are engineering language for their own purposes. We need to watch out, Unspeak author Steven Poole, tells Rosita Boland In one of his less forgettable comments following 9/11, George Bush ...

Politicians sometimes come out with such gobsmackingly paradoxical statements that you wonder why professional satirists don't shut up shop and go home. Last week yielded a perfect example, when ...

According to Steven Poole, we live in an age in which language is being increasingly bled of its proper meaning. At the same time, phrases are constantly passing into circulation whose surface ...