advice from beyond

Given the recent kerfluffle over "agendize" and other pseudo-words (not to mention blanket labels like "leftist") over on Dispatches from the Culture Wars, I thought I'd throw a little Orwell into the mix. From Politics and the English Language:

... Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers. ...[T]he normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

...In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader.... Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

Not that all neologisms are bad; sometimes they're something more. Jan Freeman writes,

But Americans had been ignoring such rules for a long time, mixing and matching stems and affixes as they pleased. Having coined cafeteria, a Spanish-style blend, they used the suffix to make shoeteria, casketeria, chocolateria, and healtheteria; the ending -dom, then fading in England, got a second wind in America, producing moviedom, flapperdom, and crookdom. Many such creations have brief lives, of course - sometimes too brief: If we're keeping mortician and beautician in the lexicon, surely we should save their adorable relative, a word Mencken cites as slang for a college cheerleader: whooptician.... For every neologism with staying power, dozens of whoopticians and casketerias die unmourned. We might as well enjoy them while we can: That's always been the American way.

So has anti-intellectualism. Sorry, George.