Tommy Denton

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For some Virginians, the pronouncement that this is a low-tax state stirs waves of pride and unremitting gratitude, not to mention a satisfying sense of rugged self-reliance.

For others, the same pronouncement amounts to a selfish abandonment of common purpose, a lack of commitment to equal opportunity and an unflattering admission that devotion to the intergenerational compact doesn't really matter.

That statement of fact -- "low-tax state" -- conveys entirely different meanings if allowed to stand alone without further definition and elaboration. Words matter, and the current sour state of public discourse reflects what happens when words, rather than being used as instruments to clarify meaning and common understanding, become instead the tools of muddling and misdirection, if not thinly veiled mendacity.

Granted, most people have neither the time nor inclination to dedicate most hours in their daily lives to in-depth study of all the facts, the vigorous preparation of argumentative strategies and the ardent rhetorical parrying expected of collegiate debating teams.

As a result, so much of the current public debate, particularly at the national level, is conducted in shorthand, or code words, for what the speaker or writer really means. For instance, "pro-life" and "pro-choice" each carries a ton of an unspoken political argument. The labels themselves too often become the "argument" without actually having to make one.

Sometimes, the objective isn't really to "win" the debate, but to inject just enough confusion over the issue so that the other side won't win. For instance, as Jonathan Chait pointed out in the current edition of The New Republic, efforts to discredit the cases for such disparate issues as global warming, evolution and growing U.S. income inequality have enjoyed some success by questioning minor details in a body of empirical research.

Despite overwhelming scholarly evidence to support the positions of advocates who seek public remedies for each of those issues, the common tactic used by their political opponents has been to find flaws in the data -- evolution skeptics can point to gaps in the fossil record, and global-warming skeptics can cite periods of global cooling -- and insist that because the empirical data are not perfect, the truth is therefore unknowable.

As the old saying goes, the perfect can become the enemy of the good, and demands for statistical perfection should be recognized as rhetorical evasions and distractions.

In his new book "Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality," Steven Poole has picked up on what very well could be a refinement of the rhetorical abuses exposed by George Orwell.

According to Jack Shafer's review last week at Slate.com, Poole distinguishes between Orwell's Newspeak and doublethink, which said one thing while meaning another, and what he calls "Unspeak." Although saying one thing while meaning one thing, Unspeak relies on the ambiguity of a range of possible meanings to create calculated, deliberate confusion.

Thus, the term or phrase can pose an argument without having to justify its premises, and then deftly unspeaks -- by negating or silencing -- any opposing viewpoint by asserting the claim to the only way of assessing a problem.

"Tax relief" and "tax burden," for instance, carry the implicit positive message that lowered taxes inherently relieve and unburden everybody.

"Detainee abuse" suggests far milder treatment than the reality of physical and psychological violence.

"Tragedy," when cited by a government for the ghastly, unforeseen bloodshed of a particular "surgical strike," leaves the impression that the outcome of a particular action was sadly but perhaps inevitably directed by the hidden, remote hand of fate and thus should be exempt from the need to hold anyone accountable for judgments and actions.

Euphemistic excesses are not confined to government functionaries seeking to frame a publicly "acceptable" context for political objectives. Poole also pointed to a Fox News Channel executive who directed news reporters to refer to U.S. military "sharpshooters" in Iraq because of the negative connotations of "snipers."

Such examples reveal just how pervasive propaganda has become. Unspeak, like all propaganda, corrodes the chain of reasoning upon which a self-governing society depends. Poole is right to note that resisting that corrosion is far more than an idle fuss over mere semantics.

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.