Politics and Language

Two essays to consider.

I think about two essays a lot, and in recent months, for obvious reasons, they have been on my mind again.

Near the beginning of his 1936 essay “Words and Behavior,” Brave New World author Aldous Huxley writes,

Hatred itself is not so strong that animals will not forget it, if distracted, even in the presence of the enemy. Watch a pair of cats, crouching on the brink of a fight. Balefully the eyes glare; from far down in the throat of each come bursts of a strange, strangled noise of defiance; as though animated by a life of their own, the tails twitch and tremble. With aimed intensity of loathing! Another moment and surely there must be an explosion. But no; all of a sudden one of the two creatures turns away, hoists a hind leg in a more than fascist salute and, with the same fixed and focused attention as it had given a moment before to…