"Z"

In movie long gone by and based on fact, a government, beset by a rebellion symbolized by a murdered leader remembered by the partisans as"Z"--phonetically meaning "He lives"--banned the use of the letter Z.

Voldemort in Potter, the Wendol in "The 13th Warrior"-- all frightened cultures have "The name that must not be spoken." Indeed, many cultures believe in the power of names. The American Indian have personal names that are symbols of their integrity which they will not reveal, even under torture. Names mean things to us.

Naming is important, too. According to Genesis, God gave Man the right to name all the animals and, at the same time, the right of dominion over them. Naming carries with it a sense of power, of hegemony. The Egyptian god Ptah allegedly had the power to create anything he could name.

The great Russian-French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck put a heavy emphasis on naming as a way to gain cognitive power over objects even before they have been understood.

Mathematicians often observe that, on the basis of intuition, they sometimes develop concepts that at first resist definition. These concepts must be named before they can be brought under control and properly enter the mathematical world. So naming can be the path toward that control. Egorov and Luzin believed that if they named God, they assured his existence, and similarly they thought that by naming new mathematical sets, they could make them real. God could not be defined, but he could be named. The new sets also resisted definition, but they too could be named. The Russians returned to Moscow and created one of the most powerful mathematical schools of the twentieth century. ( Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity by Jean-Michel Kantor and Loren Graham)--for those of you too suspicious of all this, Mr. Graham is from MIT and Harvard.

Politics is a wonderful source for a different type of control through words.
During the French Revolution, the Committee of Public Safety outlawed all words associated with royalty; they took the kings and queens out of the playing card deck and replaced them with Committee members. During the First World War the German shepherd dog was renamed the "Alsatian" by the British.
The hasty evacuation of our embassy in Yemen was not an evacuation but "a reduction in staff," despite what the Yemeni government said.

Terror attacks are now "man-caused disasters," the "global war on terror" is now an "overseas contingency operation."

Nidal Hasan proudly tells a military court that he, a soldier of Allah, killed 13 American soldiers in the name of jihad. but he is charged with "workplace violence."

An al-Qaida-affiliated terror attack in Benghazi becomes a spontaneous demonstration out of control.

Torture is "enhanced interrogation."

Government spending is "investment."
Lord knows what "shared prosperity" and "single payer" mean.

"But," as George Orwell warned, "if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."