If George Orwell and Lucille Ball had a love child, his name would be Stephen Colbert.
In the last century, the great critics of corrupt political language were British authors who wrote dystopian novels. In "1984," Orwell described a totalitarian society in which meaningless political language, dubbed Newspeak, veiled horrible truths.
Earlier, In "Brave New World," Aldous Huxley described toddlers conditioned in laboratories to be afraid of books. And in "A Clockwork Orange," Anthony Burgess imagined a world in which ultraviolent teens rampaged in a distinctive English-Russian patois that defined their alienation from society and authority.
Now in the 21st century, there is Colbert’s "truthiness" — political half-truths, quarter-truths and what the website Politifact describes as "Pants-on-Fire" prevarications.
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