Semantic infiltration means one undermines one’s own position in negotiations by adopting unknowingly the terms which the adversary “infiltrates.”

As a conservative, Ikle drew most of his examples of semantic infiltration from liberal usages that became mainstream, like “affirmative action” for race- or gender-based preference policies. But in recent years, it is arguably the center-left that has suffered the most from the successful semantic infiltration of public discourse by loaded conservative terminology.

Witness the two terms “the welfare state” and “entitlements.” The right has managed to turn “welfare state,” once a neutral description for a modern system of economic security for individuals, into a pejorative phrase.

An even greater triumph of semantic infiltration by the right has been the universal use of the term “entitlements.” As used by conservatives and liberals alike, “entitlements” usually refers to three social insurance programs — two of them universal (Social Security and Medicare) and one means-tested (Medicaid).

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When Newton was a young student just beginning college, he drew up plans for a language based on the nature of things, rather than on mere convention. The idea was to "let the names of the same sorte of things begin with the same letter: as of Instruments with s; Beasts with t; The soules passions with b, etc." In this way, words wouldn't just be arbitrary labels, haphazardly assigned. You could know from hearing a word what category of thing it belonged to. Additionally, prefixes and suffixes would indicate things like whether a word was a substance or an action, the actor or the acted upon, and so on. You could know, just by hearing a word, exactly what it meant.

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The definitive expletive of the 18th century was bloody, which is still in frequent use in Britain today, and is so common Down Under that it is known as “the great Australian adjective.” Bloody was not quite an obscenity and not quite an oath, but it was definitely a bad word that shocked and offended the ears of polite society. It is often supposed to be a corruption of the old oaths by our lady or God’s blood (minced form: ’sblood), but this is another urban legend that turns out to be false. Either it derives instead from the adjective bloody as in “covered in blood” or, as the OED proposes, it referred to the habits of aristocratic rabble-rousers at the end of the 17th century, who styled themselves “bloods.” “Bloody drunk,” then, would mean “as drunk as a blood.”

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After World War I, Americans had more money to spend. That combined with "low prices... and generous credit made cars affordable luxuries" in the early 1920s; by the end of the decade, "they were practically necessities."

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Actually, that should be "Don't use sentence fragments!" so as not to break its own rule. What is a sentence fragment? Anything that looks like a sentence — starts with a capital letter and ends with a period — but is not a syntactically complete standard sentence.

This "rule" has some validity as a general guideline, especially to help adolescents get over some of their more atrocious writing habits. But respected authors and well-educated writers have always used exceptions to the "rule" for good effect. Here are some examples:

Sentences without verbs

It's obvious that a sentence needs a verb. Right? If not, why not?

Did you see what I just did there? I didn't need to say "Is that right? If it is not, why is it not?" You can sometimes get by without restating things. This is called ellipsis, and is found in many a well-polished work of prose. No need for extra information. The shorter the better. Out with the longwinded and in with the concise.

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Sound changes

Different languages have different sets of sounds and different things you can do with those sounds. An English word may have a sound that's not used in the language, or it may have combination of sounds that isn't allowed — for instance, some languages don't allow to consonants together and will either remove one of the consonants or add a vowel between them. Japanese has the famous example of beisuboru for baseball (the u's are very light and not stressed); it also borrowed thrill as suriru because th becomes s, l becomes r, and you can't have the s and r together. Japanese sometimes cuts bits out of words, too: ballpoint pen has become boorupen (which is "ball pen," according to Japanese sound rules).

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1. Sanction (via French, from Latin sanctio(n-), from sancire 'ratify,') can mean "give official permission or approval for (an action)" or conversely, "impose a penalty on."

2. Oversight is the noun form of two verbs with contrary meanings, "oversee" and "overlook." "Oversee," from Old English ofersēon "look at from above," means "supervise" (medieval Latin for the same thing: super- "over" + videre "to see.") "Overlook" usually means the opposite: "to fail to see or observe; to pass over without noticing; to disregard, ignore."

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“And in a groundbreaking move, the Associated Press, the largest news gathering outlet in the world, will no longer use the term ‘illegal immigrant.’ That is out. No longer ‘illegal immigrant.’ They will now use the phrase ‘undocumented Democrat.’ That is the newest -- ‘undocumented Democrat.’”

The joke isn't particularly original -- it's typical fare at Tea Party rallies and conservative confabs. Here's radio hosts Rush Limbaugh, Roger Hedgecock and Lars Larson all making the same joke. Rep. Steve King earned whooping applause when he cracked the line at CPAC last month. You can even buy a whole variety of "undocumented Democrats" apparel at the UpYoursObama.com store on CafePress.

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It was only a matter of time, then, that someone would try to push "ungoogleable" as a word (though really, is there such a thing?). The Swedish Language Council tried to do just that when it created its annual list of "top 10 new words which have become popular in Sweden to show how society and language are changing," according to the BBC. The council defined "ungoogleable" ("ogooglebar" in Swedish) as anything that cannot be found by using a search engine.

But Google has historically taken issue with generalized uses of the term, citing trademark concerns and arguing that the term "google" should only describe instances in which the Google search engine is used.

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That’s what makes it necessary to state what ought to be obvious: There is no such place as cyberspace. It is not a parallel universe, coexisting with our world but in a different dimension. It is just a bad metaphor that has outlived its usefulness. Using the imagery of a fictitious country makes it harder to have rational arguments about government regulation or commercial exploitation of modern information and communications technologies.

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A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.  It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

It’s hardly as though his profile needed a boost, but what the hell. George Orwell’s publisher Penguin recently declared the inaugural “George Orwell Day” on January 21, the anniversary of his death. Organized in conjunction with the Media Standards Trust, a London-based NGO which runs the prestigious Orwell Prize for political journalism, the commemoration would be an opportunity to reflect on the life and work of one of the 20th century’s most influential political writers. And, of course, to buy his books: To mark the happy, possibly superfluous occasion, Penguin has reissued several of Orwell’s political works, with attractive new jackets designed by David Pearson. Orwell’s 1945 essay Politics and the English Language is perhaps the least known of the five reissues (the others are the novels and 1984, and the memoirs Homage to Catalonia, Down and Out in Paris and London). It is, however, arguably the most significant from the point of view of the work of the Media Standards Trust, and its publication as a discrete volume — at 26 pages it is more a pamphlet than a book, but it does have its own ISBN number — does full justice to its importance as Orwell’s major statement on literary style in political writing.

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Pei-Ying Lin, a design student at the Royal College of Art, has created a complicated matrix of emotional states and the words that best capture them.

Lin anchors the map with common emotions like love, joy, anger and fear and then connects them to satellite emotions like lust, contentment and depression. The result is a visual constellation of nuanced feeling.

For example: In Portuguese, "saudade" is the experience of "melancholic incompleteness" and is an offshoot of love, longing and yearning. It's nostalgia, but not quite. Or how about this morning when you had to drag yourself out of bed even though you had eight straight hours of rest? You might have been suffering from "vistiima," an Estonian word for listlessness without an identifiable source, a branch off of relaxation and nothingness.

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(FIJ-IH-TULL), ADJ.

1. Excessively checking one’s devices. “Victoria grew tired of watching her fidgital fiancé glance at his iPhone every five seconds.” See also: Supdate (food-related status); keybard (a skilled texter).

Lizzie Skurnick might have been joking when she coined the new word, but she's clearly on to something. A recent study by the University of Maryland's International Center for Media & the Public Agenda found that smartphone users exhibit actual withdrawal symptoms when forced to abstain from using their devices. The study also found that many subjects felt physical discomfort after not checking their phone for extended periods of time:

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Researchers gathered data from 40 infants in the U.S. and another 40 in Sweden, all less than 3 days old. The newborns were tested on two types of vowel sounds -- 17 from their native language sounds and 17 from a foreign language. Researchers then measured the infant's response to the sounds by how long they sucked a pacifier connected to a computer. The babies could control how many times they heard the vowels by sucking continuously on the pacifier, hearing the same vowel sound until they paused. Sucking the pacifier again produced a new sound. According to Science Daily, the pattern reveals how infants absorb new information:

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“I was forgetting more than I was learning,” he said. “With every chapter in the textbook came a hundred more vocabulary words. The language and the culture were accessible, but I also had a job to do. So I didn’t—and couldn’t—spend all my time studying.” Joseph cast about online for help and came across LinguaStep, an online Arabic-language program that quizzes a user in vocabulary and adapts to a user’s specific rate of learning.

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Meaning is not only constant; it’s also critical. With language, we can communicate what we think and who we are. Without language, we would be isolated. We would have no fiction, no history, and no science. To understand how meaning works, then, is to understand part of what it is to be human.

And not just human, but uniquely human. No other animal can do what we can with language. Of course, parts of human language have homologues in other animals. People talk fast, and sentences can be extremely complicated, but zebra finches sing tunes that rival our speed and complexity. Humans can drone on and on, but even a filibustering senator doesn’t outlast humpback whales, whose songs can continue for hours. And although the human ability to combine words in new ways seems pretty unique, it’s seen on a more limited scale in bees, who dance messages to each other that combine information about the orientation, quality, and distance of food sources.

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