Free Republic

Guide to LiberalSpeak A Language Translation for Normal People in a Liberal-Dominated Culture With the cultural dominance of liberalism through the “mainstream” media and the intelligentsia, it was determined that there was a need to assist the average, patriotic, common-sense American in translating the confusing, paradoxical, often contradictory-to-reality politically-correct language used by modern liberals. The following linguistic translations are offered to assist the average American in understanding. The attempt was to formulate accurate and useful translations from an objective point of view, but keeping in mind how the modern liberal uses the term. ad hominem – a type of attack...

A new study has found an association between ultra-processed foods and over 30 health complications, including depression, sleep disturbances and death related to cardiovascular disease. “Overall, direct associations were found between exposure to ultra-processed foods and 32 (71%) health parameters spanning mortality, cancer, and mental, respiratory, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and metabolic health outcomes,” study author Dr. Melissa Lane, an associate research fellow at Deakin University, told South West News Service. Ultra-processed foods — low-cost, easy-to-prepare items like cereal bars, frozen meals and pre-packaged snacks — comprise 60% of Americans’ diets and have been previously linked to poor health outcomes like cancer...

...To be clear, experts are united on the fact that this is a conspiracy theory. The causes of death were well documented by family in news stories and obituaries. It’s not clear when they were vaccinated, and, besides which, their symptoms do not match what we know about vaccine side effects from studies on millions of people. Millions of COVID vaccines have been administered in Canada, and billions around the world. Studies show the shot is overwhelmingly safe and effect, and serious side-effects exceedingly rare. So far, a coroner in Ontario included a blood clot related to vaccination in one...

As inflation continues to eat away at household budgets and fears of a major economic downturn continue to mount, the Biden administration is attempting to redefine the term "recession" in an apparent public relations push to mitigate backlash for the current state of the economy. This effort to obscure what has long been a simple, specific, and uncontroversial definition is part of an ongoing pattern of President Biden and his team redefining and weaponizing specific terms to further their political agenda and stigmatize forms of dissent they deem threatening. Here are six terms the administration has sought to redefine: 1....

California Gov. Gavin Newsom clarified this week that when he called criminals accused of stealing packages from cargo trains in the state "gangs of people" he wasn’t implying the thefts were gang-related. This is not one-off," Newsom said in a news conference near Union Pacific Railroad tracks in Los Angeles on Thursday, according to the Washington Times. "This is organized theft. These are organized gangs of people that are coming out." "Forgive me for saying ‘gangs,’ that’s not a pejorative," he clarified. "They’re organized groups of folks that move from site to site."

10 Politically Correct But Factually False Words And Phrases To Stop Using ImmediatelyTo counter the left’s lies, conservatives have to use words that accurately reflect the truth — not words that actively mean the opposite.“The worst thing one can do with words is to surrender them,” George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell protested not just sloppy use of language, but intentional misuse of language for political purposes.“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,” he said. “Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy...

The reinvention of vocabulary can often be more effective than any social protest movement. Malarial swamps can become healthy “wetlands.” Fetid “dumps” are often rebranded as green “landfills.” Global warming was once a worry about too much heat. It implied that man-made carbon emissions had so warmed the planet that life as we knew it would soon be imperiled without radical changes in consumer lifestyles. Yet in the last 30 years, record cold spells, inordinate snow levels and devastating rains have been common. How to square that circle? Substitute “climate change” for global warming. Presto! Any radical change in weather...

One of the subtleties of language is the use of euphemisms.  A euphemism is  the use of a less offensive synonym, word or phrase in place of another  term that might be considered too direct, harsh, unpleasant, or offensive. It substitutes an agreeable or inoffensive expression in place of one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant. The word comes from the Greek  euphemismos: from eu (auspicious, good, pleasant),  + pheme speech.In many cases euphemisms are harmless, even rooted in a kind of charity and a desire not to offend unnecessarily. For example we may say that someone has passed away, or departed, rather than say they died. A...

The reluctance of abortion-rights advocates to call the procedure by its name, and their preference for euphemism, is legend. To the euphemistic lexicon of "pro-choice," "women's health," "reproductive freedom," etc. ad nauseum, Charles Blow has made the latest contribution. His New York Times column of today speaks of Republican candidates opposing "a full range of reproductive options for women." More here.

The term Islamism was coined to differentiate Islam as modern ideology from Islam as a faith. It became necessary to make this distinction after the Iranian revolution of 1979, which gave rise to the popular use of the term: "Islamic fundamentalism." The use of fundamentalism to describe Islam spread so fast that by 1990, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary defined fundamentalism as "the strict maintenance of traditional Protestant beliefs" and "the strict maintenance of ancient or fundamental doctrines of any religion, especially Islam." Ironically the more the media embraced Islamic fundamentalism as a term, the more scholars of Islam looked...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A House committee voted Wednesday to eliminate some $50 million that President Barack Obama requested for the U.N. organization that helps women and children in developing countries with reproductive health and family planning, a reflection of growing Republican anger with both the world body and its work in China. The GOP-led Foreign Affairs Committee approved legislation that targets the yearly U.S. contribution to the U.N. Population Fund, an organization the United States helped found in the late 1960s. Republican administrations typically have withheld funds from the group, but Obama restored the money. The party-line vote was 23-17....

Blurring the line between humor and cynicism, Groucho Marx famously declared: "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them ... well, I have others." Indeed, Groucho's quip reflects what many Americans have come to expect from their political leaders. But even when America's leaders try to act according to principle, decades of political spin and "Washington-speak" make doing so difficult. Consider the problem facing House Republicans. With the federal government bumping up against its debt limit, Republicans are demanding that any increase in the limit be paired with equally large spending cuts. As a matter of principle, they...

How’s that for a headline? You’d think we’d know something about geopolitics, tossing around the twenty dollar word like that. But we don’t -- not too much, anyway. We do, however, know more than we’d like to about half-heartedness, as most probably do. And one doesn’t need any specialized education to know what sort of trouble half-heartedness gets everyone into. A little experience in the business of everyday life is sufficient to impart the lessons. We all know what half-heartedness is – we’ve seen it in ourselves and in those we’d relied upon for something at one time or another....

In the past, I've repeatedly written about the various epithets the PC Mainstream Media utilizes to avoid pointing to the real identity of the participants in riots, murders, and hijackings. "Somali Pirates" is one of my fave Al-Qaeda terrorist euphemisms, for example. But, now, there's the 2007 resurgence of the annual Muslim riots in France. Muslims torch and maim and slash and murder. And yet, no-one--at least no-one working for FOXNEWSMSNBCCNNABCNBCCBSAPREUTERSWASHPOSTNYTIMESDETROITNEWSISTAN--can bring themselves to call a spade a spade--a barbaric Muslim a Muslim. Paris Riot 2007 Islamic Crescent Paris Riots 2007 As I've written, FOX News once did this, but...

anchor baby: a derogatory term for a child born in the United States to an immigrant. Since these children automatically qualify as American citizens, they can later act as a sponsor for other family members. frequent flier: a repeat offender; a recidivist; generally, a person who regularly or habitually uses or takes advantage of a service. From the airline industry term but now widely used in hospitals and by police officials. Fox lips: lips colored and lined with makeup to seem more prominent, said of female anchors on Fox News. God wink: something taken as evidence that a higher power...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The government's annual accounting of hunger in the United States reported no hunger in its last outing. Instead, it found "food insecurity." Likewise, no one is even considering retreating from Iraq. "Redeploying" the heck out of there is, however, an option. In Washington, words are a moving target that conceal at least as much as they reveal. Doublespeak runs through the discourse on Iraq, terrorism and domestic matters to a point where it's hard to tell what is going on. The libertarian Cato Institute recently took on the rising tide of fuzzy words in the fight against...

ANNAPOLIS -- Democratic lawmakers have changed the word "embryo" to "material" in a bill for embryonic stem-cell research to secure the votes of Catholic senators who did not want to be viewed as supporting abortion-related legislation. "They didn't want to vote for a bill that had the language embryo in it," said Sen. Paula C. Hollinger, Baltimore County Democrat and the bill's sponsor. The bill, which appears certain of passage as early as today, calls for the state to spend $10 million for research on cells extracted from human embryos to create treatments for degenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's disease....

White people, especially white males, were depicted as something close to the plague, to be avoided or at least isolated. That is why the promotion of Philip Bennett, "who is white," to the position of the paper's number 2 editor was so controversial. But listen to this: National reporter Darryl Fears, "who is black," was quoted as saying that Bennett's promotion over Eugene Robinson, "who is black," confirmed his "worst suspicions" about "the ability of African Americans and other minorities to rise to the highest level of the best papers in the world."

Do the media give aid and comfort to terrorists by giving their violence maximum exposure and impact at times while sanitizing the perpetrators and tainting their victims at others? It is standard procedure for many media outlets to describe the perpetrators of terrorist acts - the premeditated slaughter of civilians - with a range of euphemisms, "militants" being the most common. Thus, The New York Times can headline a report on the killing of a hostage as "Iraq Militants Said to Behead a Truck Driver From Bulgaria." Similarly, terrorists killed in a military strike can be described in another as...

"I know it when I see it" was the famous response by a U.S. Supreme Court justice to the vexed problem of defining pornography. Terrorism may be no less difficult to define, but the wanton killing of schoolchildren, of mourners at a funeral, or workers at their desks in skyscrapers surely fits the know-it-when-I-see-it definition.The press, however, generally shies away from the word terrorist, preferring euphemisms. Take the assault that led to the deaths of some 400 people, many of them children, in Beslan, Russia, on September 3. Journalists have delved deep into their thesauruses, finding at least twenty euphemisms...