Opinion by Daniel Starling

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course, the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself.” Syme said to Winston Smith about their jobs translating Oldspeak into Newspeak in George Orwell’s classic “1984”.

A few years back I was sitting at my cubicle in Manhattan working to skillfully fulfill my job finding appropriate images for high-end advertising campaigns when I became incredulous. That afternoon a request came across my desk from one of the top ad agencies in the world for “aspirational” images of men and women. I said to myself at the time, “I know what they mean”—images that evoked one’s aspiring towards success--but I winced at the knowledge that “aspirational” is not really a word.

This ad word is actually part of a marketing concept, where a product or service is given a specific “branding” in order to evoke a specific feeling or reaction. It is designed to trigger that primal need to purchase a product in order to satisfy that nagging feeling of inadequacy lingering in our mortal coil.

“Aspirational” according to the Wikipedia is, “In consumer marketing, an aspirational brand (or product) means a large segment of its exposure audience wishes to own it, but for economical reasons cannot…As a general rule, an aspirational brand and its products can command a price premium in the marketplace over a commodity brand. This ability can to a large extent be explained by the consumer's need for invidious consumption for which he is willing to pay a premium.”

These concepts and terminology of this type of consumer science has evolved into a scramble by advertisers and marketers to purchase exclusive rights to words related to their products. The internet-marketplace for computer keywords has made millions. Commonly known as Adwords, they are being sold at premium by Internet portals like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Hint: non-words are easier to trademark and purchase rights to then real words. So everyone let’s invent a fancy acronym or Adword for the name of your product/brand/lifestyle that makes the consumer feel “aspirational”. Does it matter if it means anything? No. The definition and aura of luxury, success and comfort we create for it will become it’s meaning.

For all those with A.D.D., we all witnessed the emergence of all forms of digital hucksterism, outright fraud and identity theft during the .com craze. It didn’t matter if your emerging I.P.O. was just a bad idea with some capital behind it. Get a good name, a good logo and start the advertising blitz. Your .com can make you a multi-millionaire overnight!

Every year hundreds of words are being mutilated and manipulated and added to our current and popular vernacular speech through the Internet, television, movies and music. As fast as these Adwords and catchphrases fall into fashion, they fall out. The use of such slang has become like a coolness barometer used to gauge one’s age and cultural acuity.

With the latest addition of the cyber-texting world filled with emoticons and words stripped of their vowels, I often feel dumbfounded looking down at my cell phone. What is this person trying to say,” I mumble to myself. “C u Tmrw aftrn. XOXO : >” I must be getting old.

Are people just too lazy or busy to spell things out, to try and speak clearly and concisely or have we become a culture of catchphrases, marketing schemes, phony counter culture sales pitches meant to appeal to your demographic? Is everything in American culture being reduced to a focus-group research sales pitch? Our music, our art, our national character is to be defined by advertising?

American culture lurches from one fad or fashion to the next with millions unable to answer simple questions about the government, geography or history. Late night TV and game shows have found a way to exploit our collective stupidity, by using it as entertainment on shows like “Are you Smarter than a Fifth Grader?” The answer to anyone who has watched this show is obviously not.

Even “celebutard” (a word ironically invented to describe its subject) Paris Hilton tried to purchase worldwide trademark rights to her vapid catchphrase, “That’s hot!” It was reported that since she’s believed to have invented and popularized the lame, nearly illiterate phrase it should become exclusively hers. She failed sadly but I felt particularly inspired and now want to trademark the phrase, “Hate to see you when you turn 40!”

The worst hypocrites among these word-twisting “Adspeak re-branders” currently are those corporations who have magically become great stewards of our environment by calling themselves “Green”.

In response to this obvious attempt to appear to be environmentalists, I discovered and have been proselytizing the relevant counter-catch-phrase, explaining their newest marketing ploy: “Green Washing”.

Green Washing is similar to white washing excepting in the end the viewer is meant to be mollified and pacified with the knowledge that the world’s eco-system is being destroyed by their internal combustion engine. Its ultimate definition will be written by the largest polluters in America, who are currently painting their company trucks with green flowers and pitching inane “green energy solutions” like ethanol and “clean coal” upon the minds of Americans.

The Bush Administration, specifically Karl Rove, must have “highlighted” entire sections of George Orwell’s “1984”. Their manipulation of this advertising-based model of language was used nefariously to muddle and confuse complex legal concepts (i.e. Geneva Conventions and Habeas Corpus) and intellectual pursuits (i.e. life sciences, related to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution) with semantically suspect and intellectually dishonest phrases like “enemy combatant” and “intelligent design”.

The media has been an unwitting participant in helping to foist these mind-numbing, advertorial definitions upon the vocabulary of American society. No longer are reports involving precise definitions and agreed upon perimeters of language being used, in favor of the latest invented descriptor word being bandied about on talk-radio millionaire populists like Rush “Oxycontin” Limbaugh. “Ditto, you dittoheads!”

By the by, “Oxy” as it is known on the street, is a form of synthetic heroin. Strange how no one ever points out the fact that it’s a nasty narcotic. The country’s most conservative radio syndicate, Premier, just gave an opiate junkie a $400 million dollar, eight-year extension. I guess it helps that Rush comes from a famous and pious family of lawyers in Christian Missouri and his ratings have climbed bashing the Obama administration.

It seems to me that accuracy in reporting has been discarded for the lyrical, over-simplified, trite sound bites used by TV talking heads and sit-com writers. They invent words like “murse”, used to describe a man’s shoulder bag or “excessive procyclicality” used recently by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke—to explain reforms that “do not overly magnify the ups and downs in the financial system and the economy.”

Huh? Isn’t there enough volatility in the financial world without introducing half-baked and philosophical challenged concepts like the “Too Big To Fail Theory” of government intervention in the marketplace? You would think so, but it is obvious that M.B.A.’s, Ad writers and public relations specialists think we’re all stupid or illiterate. They can get an “F” in English and still be allowed to run a company, run a national ad campaign, have a talk show or advise a nation’s leader for that matter!

How come it too often sounds like both the private and public sector is just making stuff up as they go along? Buyer Beware! It is up to the American citizen-consumer to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Don’t believe the hype!