On Language

Yesterday was Eric Blair's birthday. He was born on June 25 in 1903 in Motihari, India.

You probably know him by his pen name: George Orwell.

He's the guy who wrote 1984 and Animal Farm (two books you should really read before they've all been bonfired.)

In 1946, a few years before he died, Orwell published an essay titled "Politics and the English Language." It's probably something else you should probably read.

Here's a taste:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. [British spelling and italics in original]

A day or so ago in Time:

White House Senior Adviser Kellyanne Conway denied that the Senate's health care bill would cut Medicaid, even though the draft revealed Thursday suggests otherwise.

"These are not cuts to Medicaid,"Conway told George Stephanopoulos on ABC's This Week. "This slows the rate for the future and it allows governors more flexibility with Medicaid dollars because they're closest to the people in need."

But the draft of the health care bill Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell released on Thursday includes steep cuts to Medicaid, aiming to phase out the federal funding implemented under Obamacare for states to expand Medicaid eligibility.

So it's not a cut in funding. It simply "slows the rate for the future" and so on.