Article6

English is a liar’s paradise. It is the language of Shakespeare and Lincoln, but also of spin doctors, lawyers, and generals who kill with words before they kill with weapons. Its genius lies in its capacity for poetry; its danger lies in its capacity for deception. The same vocabulary that gave us Hamlet’s soliloquy also gave us “collateral damage.” The same tongue that thundered at Gettysburg now sells “enhanced interrogation techniques.” And for non-native speakers—billions across the planet who must submit to English as the global tongue—the burden is crushing. They are asked not merely to learn a language but to enter a labyrinth built out of centuries of conquest, class hierarchy, and calculated obfuscation.

Robert Claiborne was right to call English a “bastard tongue.” It was born in invasion and theft, a mongrel stitched together from Anglo-Saxon bluntness, Norman French refinement, and Latinate abstraction, later fattened on the spoils of colonialism. Its hybridity gave it an unmatched expressive range. A man may “ask,” “inquire,” or “interrogate,” depending on the desired register. Each word describes the same act but carries its own baggage: plain, polite, or bureaucratic. Other languages enforce clarity; English luxuriates in disguise. From the beginning, it has been a language of masks.

Stuart Chase saw the danger clearly in The Tyranny of Words. He warned that people confuse words with the realities they represent, and that abstractions like “justice,” “progress,” or “freedom” hypnotize audiences while floating untethered from fact. His prescription was semantic hygiene: to strip words of their mystique and tether them to operational meaning. But English, swollen with Latinate abstractions and euphonious vagueness, became the perfect tool for politicians and advertisers to cloud minds rather than clarify them. Where Sanskrit philosophers parsed categories with ruthless precision and Confucius demanded the rectification of names, English offered only an arms race of vagueness and incantation.

Orwell, writing in 1946, diagnosed the disease as political cowardice. A village is not bombed; it is “pacified.” A prisoner is not tortured; he undergoes “enhanced interrogation.” Civilians are not massacred; they become “collateral damage.” Orwell warned that this corruption of language was more than a mere stylistic issue. It was moral anesthesia. By the time the words have finished their work, the conscience no longer bleeds. English, with its infinite capacity for substitution, is the perfect vehicle for conveying lies that sound like truth.

Modern science has proved Orwell right. Psychologists who study deception find that liars often betray themselves in their grammar and style, as they tend to avoid first-person pronouns, hedge their claims with vague qualifiers, and strip their language of concrete details. English makes this easy because it offers an endless array of synonyms, hedges, and circumlocutions. The liar swims freely in its abundance. Yet style also leaves fingerprints; every euphemism, every hedge, every abstraction becomes a trace of guilt. The very richness of English that makes it a liar’s paradise also ensures that the lie can never be perfectly concealed.

Nowhere is the duplicity of English more devastating than in the law. Legal English is the most elaborate cathedral of euphemism ever constructed. Its foundations are fossilized archaisms—“hereinafter,” “aforesaid,” “party of the first part”—that dazzle laypeople into dependence on lawyers. Its walls are strategic ambiguities—“reasonable,” “due process,” “good faith”—words that sound precise but leave vast room for manipulation. Its stained-glass windows are euphemisms: “civil forfeiture” for legalized theft, “custodial interrogation” for pressure under threat, “correctional facility” for prison, “officer-involved shooting” for police killing. The structure is deliberate. Opaqueness excludes the common man. Ambiguity empowers the judge. Euphemism shields the state.

Contracts perfect this architecture of deception. Buried in fine print, obligations are hidden under subordinate clauses and double negatives. Consumers “agree” to terms they cannot possibly understand. Workers sign away rights without knowing it. Nations take loans whose euphemisms—“structural adjustment,” “conditionality,” “stabilization”—conceal austerity, privatization, and permanent dependency. In the law, words are not about describing reality. They are reality. A person loses freedom, land, or life not because of what they did, but because of the way English was arranged on the page.

History is littered with victims of this linguistic tyranny. The Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand, signed in 1840, was drafted in two versions: English and Māori. The English version claimed full sovereignty for the Crown. The Māori version used the word kawanatanga, which meant governance, closer to shared authority. The chiefs believed they were agreeing to a partnership; the British insisted they had ceded their independence. The result was a century of dispossession. The deception lay not on the battlefield but in the vocabulary.

In the United States, treaty after treaty with Native Americans was written in English and loaded with poisoned words. The Sioux who signed the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 thought they had secured the Black Hills “forever.” But in English legalese, “forever” proved elastic, easily snapped when gold was discovered. The tribes had no chance against the English’s paper weapons. Armies followed, but the conquest was already achieved in words.

Colonial India saw the same trick. Princes signed “subsidiary alliances” with the East India Company, thinking they were securing protection. In truth, they were signing away sovereignty. The phrase “doctrine of lapse” allowed the Company to seize entire kingdoms when a ruler died without a male heir. The euphemism was bloodless; the consequences were not. Empire expanded not by sword alone but by contract. English was the sharpest weapon.

In the twentieth century, the arena shifted from empire to economics. Nations desperate for capital signed World Bank and IMF agreements written in impeccable English. Words like “structural adjustment” and “conditionality” sounded technical and neutral. In reality, they meant slashed healthcare, privatized water, and dismantled protections for workers. An entire generation in Latin America and Africa learned the hard way that “reform” in English means suffering in reality.

Even today, the pattern continues. The migrant worker in the Gulf who signs an employment contract in English, the farmer in India who clicks “agree” on a seed license, the delivery driver in Nairobi who accepts a platform’s “terms and conditions”—all are bound by obligations they cannot read, let alone negotiate. The consent is fiction. The deception is systematic. English has become the world’s fine print, and the world is trapped inside it.

For non-native speakers, this is not simply difficult. It is treacherous. They are not only learning irregular verbs and idioms; they are entering a linguistic minefield where words are designed to mislead them. They discover too late that “downsizing” means unemployment, that “civil forfeiture” means legalized robbery, that “collateral damage” means their families. English does not just test their grammar; it tests their survival.

Other civilizations tried to defend themselves against this tyranny. In India, philosophers of language tied speech to dharma, insisting that words must serve truth. In China, Confucius advocated for names that reflected reality, ensuring social harmony could endure. In Greece, dialecticians hammered at words until they revealed their contradictions. English has no such discipline. It evolved under empire and capitalism, where power rewarded those who obscured, not those who clarified. It became not a mirror of reality but a weapon against it.

This is why English rules the world. Not because it is honest, but because it is helpful for power. It is Shakespeare and Lincoln, yes. But it is also Madison Avenue and Wall Street, the Pentagon and the World Bank, the courtroom and the fine print. It seduces non-natives with the promise of modernity and traps them with the machinery of deception. It is not merely a global lingua franca. It is a worldwide instrument of control.

To resist this tyranny is not a matter of style. It is a moral duty. The only defense against the liar’s paradise is vigilance. To strip away euphemisms. To call killing by its name. To call theft by its name. To call lies by their name. To demand translations that reveal rather than conceal, to teach non-native speakers not just grammar but the politics of English itself. To refuse the fog, to rectify the names, to tether words to realities again.

For too long, we have mistaken English’s genius for a blessing. In truth, its genius is double-faced. It can illuminate like poetry or suffocate like propaganda. It can liberate minds or enslave nations. The difference is vigilance. To accept English at face value is to live under the tyranny of words. To strip its disguises away is to reclaim truth from the empire of lies.