stions can only be negative. Marin Esslin believes:
It is . . . possible to assert that reasoned argument has been severely reduced in political discussion and debate, that the level of political knowledge among the masses is deplorably low, and that in many democratic countries the percentages of votes cast in elections are decreasing at an alarming rate. It can be argued . . . the masses [as Orwell envisaged] might well decline to the status of disenfranchised and politically castrated proles (Stansky 135).
Individual words are powerful tools. Elizabeth Traugott points "to the fact that the use of generic man, as in 'the history of man,' or he can serve to silently exclude, and so devalue, half the world's population." She also demonstrates how interchanging the words fetus and baby influenced the outcome of an abortion trial, and how the word smash made a group, viewing a videotape of a car accident, see broken glass that did not exist (Traugott 99). The ability to manipulate words is power:
Words make mass action possible. With words ringing in their heads, masses of men have made revolutions and crusades, flung themselves into war, savaged other human beings who refused to give up some contrary form of talk. Through words some of the most potent forces of modern politics are wheeled into motion (Rodgers 4).
Political words are designed and molded to interfere with the critical thinking process. Contemporary manipulation of words is parallel to the shaping of words in the "Newspeak" language in Orwell's 1984. There are words that are hopelessly vague and have no agreed-on definition. They appeal to the emotions, since they either refer to things "widely known [as] good things, approved by all right-thinking people" or to things widely known as bad things, shunned by all right-thinking people (Chilton 29). According to Elizabeth Traugott, "the political vocabulary of Newspeak is full of ambigui...