In an article (HT Jim Taranto at Best of the Web) describing Ireland's emergence as an European Union powerhouse ("Entrepreneurship Takes Off in Ireland"), reporter James Flanigan of the New York Times simply could not bring himself to specifically identify the main reasons for the country's success (bolds are mine):
“The change came in the 1990s,” said James Murphy, founder and managing director of Lifes2Good, a marketer of drugstore products for muscle aches, hair loss and other maladies. “Taxes and interest rates came down, and all of a sudden we believed in ourselves.”So tax rates "changed," eh? And we're told that "taxes and interest rates came down," as if by some external supernatural force.
The reason taxes "came down," of course, is that they were proactively C-U-T, cut (the word "cut" does not appear even once in the article).
The Times's C-word allergy is all the more maddening because, like so many other Old Media outlets, it doesn't hesitate to describe reductions in projected spending increases in government programs as "cuts," even though, virtually without exception, year-over-year dollars spent continue to increase. You would think that employing the three-letter C-word when a cut actually does occur -- even a dreaded tax cut -- wouldn't be that difficult. But it clearly is.
[subtle, but pervasive - and how an ideology goes about controlling the language of a debate.]
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110011111
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