From: Jeff Stewart  [Email him ]

It's strange and fascinating to see 'Newspeak' implemented before your eyes.

MSM's expansive coverage of the "humanitarian crisis" at our border has apparently got the elite classes so worried they've gone ahead and changed the language on us. In a NYT piece by the Wilson Center on Thursday [A Worrying Trend With No Quick Fix, By Eric L. Olson] and in a piece in The Hill the day before by the Cato Institute, the phrase "Unaccompanied Alien Minors" was clipped of its word-count (and meaning) to become simply "Unaccompanied Minors."

Open Borders economist Alex Nowrasteh actual called them UACs, but translated that as “unaccompanied children”,

Smugglers know that children reuniting with their families and those fleeing violence are the most likely to pay high prices, thus the smugglers have focused on recruiting those groups as customers – one large reason why so many unaccompanied children (UAC) are transported to the border by smugglers.

Immigration Enforcement Aids Smugglers – Unaccompanied Children Edition, By Alex Nowrasteh, June 30, 2014.

ICE, for its part, is no longer calling them UACs: ICE Removes 'Alien' from Term for Illegal Immigrant Children, by Caroline May, Breitbart.com, July 3, 2014.

They weren't just being lazy. The phrase “Unaccompanied Minors” which covers anyone alone and under 18, is of course not specific enough to accurately describe the intended subject matter.

The purpose of such a change, as Winston Smith told us 1984, "is not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible." Consolidate the language and you cull the problem.

But let's hope Steven Pinker was right when he countered the motivations of Newspeak with what he called the "euphemism treadmill": "concepts, not words, are in charge: give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name."[The Game of The Name, NYT, April 5, 1993]