In 1845 Edwin Whipple, an eminent New England literary critic, published in the American Review a remarkable essay on the power and duplicity of words in which he declares at the outset, “Words … exercise such an untrammeled influence [in the concerns of the world], that it is unjust to degrade them from sovereigns into representatives”. He adds, “The true ruler of this big, bouncing world is the Lexicon. Every new word added to its accumulated thousands is a new element of servitude to mankind.” For Americans today Whipple's words should sound a familiar note of alarm, for in the past two decades, and especially as we approached 1984, we were frequently reminded of George Orwell's vision of the tyranny of Newspeak. It appeared to many citizens that in the era of Vietnam, Watergate, and Nukespeak we were enduring in our own state a long reign of linguistic and political misrepresentation that threatened the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. The words of our political leaders not only cloaked indefensible actions with the semblance of virtue but seemingly led us to commit them: in Southeast Asia, we made a wasteland of villages and called it pacification; in Nixon's White House, the term “national security” sanctioned criminal break-ins; and at Reagan's urging, MX missiles were funded as Peacekeepers, a term applied in nineteenth-century America to the Colt .45 pistol.