Submarine Channel
Since this is the big day in the US, we wanted to show you a little piece from a project we are working on called Unspeak. It’s based on the book by the amazing British author Steven Poole. Unspeak is a series that looks at how language can smuggle persuasion into description.
Think of words like war on terror, weapons of mass destruction, climate change; failed asylum-seekers, file-sharing, austerity measures, oil spill, erectile dysfunction.
There’s rarely any such thing as perfectly neutral vocabulary. George Orwell, who wrote about Newspeak in 1984, thought that, language could be as clear as a window-pane. It can’t: every word is a rhetorical choice, and comes cocooned in a web of associations and ideas. But the choice of these associations can be more or less deceptive.
Unspeak is language that deliberately loads the dice.
Once we tune in to Unspeak, we start seeing and hearing it everywhere. And then, perhaps, we can fight back.
Check out this short introduction film to find out more!
