Amoral language and political discourse

One advantage, perhaps the only advantage, of being sick is the chance to catch up on reading.

And reading I came across a passage that has some relevance to the recent difficulties in political discourse. Although nearly 500 years old it expresses a real problem -- language that hides meaning rather than expresses meaning (consider 'interrogation technique' for 'torture').

Erasamus, in Lingua (1524), suggested that the mind, once language loses proper meaning, cannot judge its own "moral sickness... because we are damaged in the very part that enables us to judge. What remedy then could you apply to help a man who calls his insatiable acquisitiveness 'taking thought for the future' or his envy 'a passion for honour' or who ... covers up compulsive scurrility with the label of 'frankness'"
James Morton
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