Writing in the WSJ “Opinion Journal,” Claudia Rosett — invoking Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” — examines media doubletalk vis-a-vis the Mideast crisis (something that I’ve been harping on for several weeks now — though Ms. Rosett, bless her, manages to write an entire column without lapsing into one of those jags of curse-laden invective I’ve been so prone to recently):

From the vantage point of New York, for someone trying to glean a genuine sense of what’s going on — from the speeches, the newscasts, the talk shows, the newspapers — the vertigo begins with the vacuous lingo so widely used to describe the situation and the players.

Thus are we now hearing about Secretary of State Colin Powell’s mission to visit the ‘isolated’ Yasser Arafat in hopes of reviving ‘the peace process’ while Palestinians described as ‘suicide bombers’ murder Israelis in what we are told are acts of ‘desperation.’

Between the words and any precise reality is a disconnect so dizzying that this week it sent me ransacking the shelves for a 1946 essay by a man who understood well the danger of blurring the truth with jargon: George Orwell. Titled ‘Politics and the English Language,’ this is a piece in which Orwell explained the huge importance — not least in politics — of using language ‘as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.’ A virtue of talking straight, he noted, is that ‘when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.’ And ‘political language,’ he warned us, ‘is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’

For Rosett, nowhere is this dizzying disconnect between words and referents so pernicious as with the phrase, “peace process” — used in a decidedly euphemistic way to characterize ubiquitously impotent diplomatic machinations in the Middle East:

Negotiating with terrorists, or, in President Bush’s excellent formulation, ‘those who harbor them,’ amounts to capitulation. Maybe we should call the current route we’ve mapped out for Israel ‘the capitulation process,’ or, since ‘process’ is a windy word, just get rid of it and talk in terms of straight ‘capitulation.’ At least then it would be harder to fool ourselves about the nature of this mission.

Which brings us to the ‘isolated’ Arafat, whom Mr. Powell has been dispatched to ‘process’ with. It was Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who chose the term ‘isolate,’ seeking some way out of the impossible situation imposed by U.S. pressure to respond to continuing terrorism with yet more peace process and more Arafat. But this label of isolation has been blindly, faithfully repeated day after day, in the face of all evidence, until it has become the accepted phrase for Arafat’s situation.

Arafat is surrounded, yes. But he’s one of the least isolated figures on the planet. Not only is he the center of world attention, but we are treated to daily (at times, hourly) reports on his immediate condition and utterances. Since his ‘isolation’ began late last month, we have heard endlessly about Arafat giving interviews by the light of a guttering candle. He’s keeping the world apprised by cell phone of just how low his cell phone batteries are getting.

[…] Unfortunately, once a term becomes standard coin, it’s hard to get people to change it. Not only is there the lure of hazy language that lets us avoid things rough to face. There is also an ease to using accepted shorthand; it requires less thought, less effort. In making the observations above, I fear I won’t go long without using some of these cloudy phrases myself. But they need thinking about.

Orwell closes his essay with the advice: ‘One cannot change all this in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase–some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse–into the dustbin where it belongs.’ How about we start with Middle East peace process?

Ms. Rosett is right: I’ve excoriated soft-bellied puff journalists like Charlie Gibson for slipping easily into journalistic lounge chairs like “the cycle of violence” for several weeks now, yet I’ve continued to refer to exploding mass murderers as “suicide bombers.”

No more. I’m cashing in the “standard coin” — trading my stash o’ ready-made phrases for some magic word beans. We’ll see how it goes.