The Great Renaming, or How Prices Learned to "Change"
A feuilleton about a new dialect in which price increase sounds like recovery
“Political language is needed to make lies sound truthful,
and murder is respectable."
— George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"
and murder is respectable."
— George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"
The patient is more likely to be alive than not.
A council of doctors gathered at an institution with a long name and a short meaning. The patient—an economist—lay on a couch, breathing heavily, while people in white coats (though their official collars peeked out from under their coats) stood around, debating the best way to describe what was happening to him.
“He’s falling,” the young statistician said timidly, pointing his finger at the cardiogram, where the line was confidently creeping under the floor.
“He’s not falling,” the senior therapist named corrected sternly. Maxim Otraslevich— It's cooling down. After overheating. This, colleague, is a normal cyclical process, like how tea gets cold if you don't drink it in time.
“But at least there was tea,” the statistician noted.
Here they explained to him that he had analyzed the figure incorrectly, and asked him to “further analyze” it again – until he began to like it.
Optimist's Dictionary
It must be said that this venerable agency had long since developed a special dialect—a language in which bad news is disguised as good, like a robber in a cassock. It operated on a simple but reliable principle: the troublemaker's surname is taken away and a new, more respectable one is given.
This adverb is structured like this:
- When goods become cheaper, they are honest "become cheaper", proudly and with an indication of direction.
- When goods become more expensive, they, looking down delicately, "change"They change by 0,9%, by 1,3%, they change in all directions, except for the only one - upwards - which no longer exists in nature.
- When the economy stands still, it doesn't stand still, but "is being structurally fine-tuned": pretends to be busy with something complex and useful, like a person thoughtfully studying the ceiling.
- When an investment fails, it's not a failure, it's investment restraint: it wasn’t us that were in trouble, but we ourselves, of our own free will and out of modesty, restrained ourselves, like a guest who refused a third cutlet.
"Restraint" was especially good. It concealed character, like a good suit. "Pause" is when the process breaks down and stalls. And "restraint" is when a master of the situation emerges, a strong-willed master who folds his arms across his chest like a soldier and consciously decides not to invest anything. Ruin at attention. Impoverishment by choice.
Father of the genre
Maxim Otraslevich, to his credit, was less a doctor than a poet. He counted words aloud, like one counts a rosary. "A pause is bad," he mused, looking out the window. "A pause smells like a stop. But restraint is an action." When he found the right word, he didn't rejoice; he frowned, as if he'd found the missing piece to a complex but useless device.
And the word, barely born, would immediately roll down through all the floors and multiply into a thousand copies, until the next day, every iron would sound exactly the same. Thus was born a new grammar, in which:
The economic downturn became a phase of inspired, progressive, and deeply meaningful rest, and the recession, when it finally came, was declared “technical”—that is, not real, like an artificial coma from which the patient would inevitably emerge.
Morality that has changed in price
Trouble, however, arose with the customer. While the high-ranking officials debated what label to bestow upon the patient—"chill," "hypothermia," or, for the textbooks, "a trap named after someone honored" (these troubles always seem to be named after someone)—the citizen stood at the checkout and paid exactly the amount indicated on the price tag. But the price tag, the ignoramus, hadn't read Newspeak and stubbornly "changed" upward.
Because the word has one unfortunate flaw: no matter how you warm it up, it doesn't make the loan any cheaper, and the cutlet in the cafeteria doesn't just start popping up by itself just because it was called a "structurally tuned protein product."
And the only reliable sign left for the outside observer is this: the softer the word, the greater the trouble hidden behind it. As soon as you hear "a slight adjustment as part of planned stabilization" instead of "prices went up," hold on tight to your wallet: it's cooling down after overheating.
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