There's a new code-word floating around in Dubyaspeak: 'rendition'. If you thought you already knew that word and its meaning, get a load of this.
There's not an awful lot these days, as Pavlov's Cat enters the mellow years, that makes the actual back of her eyeballs go all red and steaming. But vicious violence done to the language in an attempt to cover up vicious violence done to other human beings is one of the things that will still do it.
Do you ever get the impression the approach they've chosen is to assume that if people can't understand what they are saying, they'll get bored and not worry about it?
ReplyDeleteI think what disturbs me about it, amongst other things, is that it reminds me of nineteenth century meatworks rendering down carcasses into fat- to be rendered, the act of rendition...
ReplyDeleteYes, I thought of the rendering of fat too, except for some reason what I envisaged was chicken fat --much less icky.
ReplyDeleteLudicrously conflated with the horrid images of molten fat is the (also rather 19thC now I think of it) idea of reciting or singing, as in "Miss Boodleforth's rendition of 'The Last Rose of Summer' was sweetly pretty." (See almost any mid-19thC Australian newspaper if you think I made this sentence up.)
or rendering unto Caesar, perhaps.
ReplyDeleteyour thoughts are questionable. newspeak is doubleplus good. war is peace. freedom is slavery. rendition is salvation.
ReplyDelete