Here.

[. . .]

Ever since Cangjie invented characters, the written language has often been thought of as a little girl who dresses herself up however she pleases. But our ancestors may never have guessed that spoken and written language could become this insipid. *Zhang Weiying once reminded us to pay attention to the corruption of language, that is, treating ugliness as beauty, and the idea that the more fake something is the more beautiful it is. When we read the reactions to those paeans, we recognize every word, but have no clue what they mean. The written word is as vacant as the gaze of a scarecrow, and even the shabbiest whitewashing can’t help.

In his novel “1984,” George Orwell ingeniously used the word “newspeak.” Old speech was forbidden and disappeared from public life. From there, words that weren’t approved of, and the ideas they represented, disappeared from people’s minds.

Reality proves that this is not a fairytale. Because there really are a lot of people who have been trained to the point of being incapable of talking sensibly—onstage they speak lies and empty words, and offstage it’s the unprecedented vulgarity of so-called “Internet slang.” In an age where the spoken and written language have been so manipulated that it’s impossible to read things to the end, what still has the power to persuade?

[. . .]

* Zhang Weiying: China'a anti Keynesian insurgent (apparently he and the above were also fans of Confucius' little homily) re Language Murder™© ..posted now at least every decade, in these parts. GMTA!
;-þ