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Colorado has enjoyed an official language since 1988, but the state government has never got around to publishing a dictionary of Colorado Official English.
That's probably just as well, because the dictionary would have to include a special section dedicated to the Boulder Dialect of Official Colorado English. The most recent distinction between Boulder English and the language we use in the less enlightened portions of our state appeared last week.
There were allegations and investigations concerning the
recruiting of athletes to the football program at the
University of Colorado. The charges included rape, underage
drinking, wild parties, escort services -- that is, what
most of us would call a scandal.
However, that's not the right word, according to
Boulder's leading football coach, Gary Barnett: I'd like
to officially not acknowledge that word scandal,
he
said last week. I refuse to think of that as the proper
word to describe it.
From what I read, he didn't offer a proper word,
and thus the word that comes to mind to describe Barnett's
attitude is denial.
But he's hardly the only one who
speaks Boulderese, a dialect that eliminates unpleasantness
from English.
Go back a few years, and there was the official Boulder municipal spokesperson, Leslie Aaholm. She was handling a lot of inquiries about the still-unsolved murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey on Dec. 26, 1996.
Aaholm did her best to avoid using unpalatable but
accurate terms like murder.
Instead, she kept
calling it an incident,
which could mean anything
from jaywalking to the 9/11 attacks.
More recently, in the summer of 2000, Boulder became the
first city in the United States to change the language of
its municipal code so that a person no longer owns
a
pet.
Instead of being a pet owner, a Boulderite with
a dog or cat or ferret is the guardian
of a
companion animal.
The theory behind this was that it would make people
more responsible by changing the way they think -- which,
upon further thought, sounds rather Orwellian. One job of
the Ministry of Truth in his novel 1984
was to purge
the language of any words that could communicate rebellion,
thus making it more-or-less impossible for people even to
think about overthrowing Big Brother, who was always
watching.
Orwell also write a brilliant essay in 1946, Politics
and the English Language,
wherein he stated that
Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the
inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle
machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary
bullets: this is called pacification.... People are
imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of
the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps:
this is called 'elimination of undesirable
elements.
'
Orwell saw this abuse of language as a major problem,
since it corrupted public discourse. All issues are
political issues,
he wrote, and Political language
-- and with variations this is true of all political
parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to
make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to
give appearances of solidity to pure wind.
And, it appears, to make Boulder sound like a place whose guardians of companion animals are troubled by neither murder nor scandal, merely an incident and a word to be announced later by the football coach.
Boulder won't be the only offender; there will be much
more such blather, since this is an election year. We'll
hear about the liberation of Iraq
when the civilian
death toll there is about the same as it was when Saddam
Hussein was in charge. According to Human Rights Watch,
about 250,000 Iraqis were disappeared
during the 25
years of Ba'athist rule, or 10,000 per year. The best
estimates of related civilian deaths since the 2003
invasion come to about 12,000, which works out to 9,000 per
year.
We will hear about the preservation of traditional
values,
and endure the advocacy of our own special
Colorado values,
whatever they are. Indeed, if
Orwell were around today, he'd doubtless add values
to his list of political expressions that sound solid but
are actually just pure wind.
That might be the worst aspect of Boulderese -- that it's not confined to Boulder. No matter what your political persuasion, there is always a need to gloss over disturbing facts and pretend that certain things didn't happen.
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