There’s a special kind of language that doesn’t tell you what’s happening—it tells you what to feel about it. It’s an art form, really. A performance where words pretend to inform but actually sedate. Bureaucrats, generals, and “information managers” have refined it into a linguistic ballet: graceful, bloodless, and utterly lethal to thought.
It’s called doublespeak. Or, in the more poetic tongues of the East, necro-speak—the language of the … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ As I was riding in the car with my wife yesterday evening, heading for the Dog Shop and the supermarket, there was some pretty cool rap music on the radio. It was rather strange: slow and soft instead of punching at you like a back alley beatdown, but the usual rhyming patterns were there, and as with the best of that genre, you can … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ As we study history together, I often show documentary films to my students. When these films are about the distant past, there is a voice (or person-moderator) who walks us through the information, using whatever illustrations can be mustered. But as we get nearer to modern times the documentaries come to life: actual human action in black and white. From the late 19th … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ I remember working in a pub in Crawley, near Gatwick airport in London. Many years ago. I was by then probably in my early 30s. Yet, as they say, ‘everybody gets old, but you can stay immature forever.’ That would have been me back then.
I had lived in Bath during the 1970s, returned to the US to do a Master’s degree … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ For years, the sight of watching other people in the act of praying has made me uncomfortable. I really don’t understand why, unless somehow or other it brings to the boil some latent sense of my own guilt. Like, maybe I should be doing it too but am too proud. Or maybe it’s just that the only congregations I like are big crowds at … Read the rest
