Stealing a march?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Stealing a march?

With the Cold War over and no formidable foe on the horizon, these critics ask, why does the nation need the biggest increase in military spending since the Reagan era? Why, indeed.

- A Defense Mission Too Costly? Chicago Tribune, January 25, 1999.

2. Financial markets are falling because there is no predictability. And, just as our markets have crashed, so too, has our language. Under the 111th Congress, our language no longer has any predictability. How can we create good policy and generate bipartisan support if our very language to achieve these ends is continually and capriciously changing?

Aristotle counseled against the inevitable ambiguity that occurs as a result of employing ambiguous names when describing an item, but Congress has not heeded that warning. A strange dynamic is currently occurring in congressional dialogue, in which euphemisms have stolen a march on reason, and what is said has become more important than what was done.

Most Americans are familiar with the renaming of the “second economic stimulus” to “the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” perhaps renamed because the word “second” reminds us that the first stimulus did not work as advertised.

Congressional semanticists have renamed federal government spending as an “investment” and claimed that a government check for a tax refund to a person who did not pay taxes is something other than “welfare.”