Nineteen Eighty-Four should be required reading for anyone who votes. Through a tale of totalitarian dystopia, George Orwell shows how the State can distort language for its ever shifting purposes. “Doublespeak” is one of the neologisms of the novel that has entered the vernacular. What exactly is it? According to William Lutz, professor of English:

Despite the gravity of the phenomenon, humorous examples abound. For example, The Quarterly Journal of Doublespeak reports a vote by the Minnesota Board of Education “…to consider requiring all students do some ‘volunteer work’ as a prerequisite for High School graduation.” We can all laugh. But there is nothing laughable when, say, the US government refers to the drowning of prisoners denied habeas corpus as the “waterboarding” of “detainees.” Doctors were on duty to perform tracheotomies if necessary.

In the spectrum of doublespeak, I am tempted to locate the “market failure” of economic theory somewhere between the “volunteer work” mandated by the Minnesota Board of Education and the “waterboards” authorized in the Bush Administration Torture Memos.