Social:Wooden language
Wooden language is language that uses vague, ambiguous, abstract or pompous words in order to divert attention from the salient issues.[1] The French scholar Françoise Thom identified four characteristics of wooden language: abstraction and the avoidance of the concrete, tautologies, bad metaphors, and Manichaeism that divides the world into good and evil.[2] It originally referred to wording imposed by the Soviet Union.[2] The phrase is a literal translation of the French expression langue de bois. The French phrase became widely used during the 1970s and 1980s, arriving in the language from Russian via Polish.[1]
The fictional language of Newspeak in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four often mirrors and satirizes wooden language.[2]
See also
References
Sources
- Caparini, Marina; Fluri, Philipp (2006). Civil Society and the Security Sector: Concepts and Practices in New Democracies, LIT Verlag Berlin–Hamburg–Münster, ISBN:3-8258-9364-2.
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