Ali Eteraz: Bush's war on terror did unspeakable violence to the English language

Growing up and then attending college in America's deep south, I was taught that when it came to the English language liberals were like Humpty Dumpty. What with their "deconstruction" and "post-modernism" and "relativism" those leftists – linguistic anarchists! literary terrorists! – could make a word mean "just what I choose it to mean".
Meanwhile, conservatives were the mature and staid and serious "defenders" of "the canon" and "the great books" and "the classics". They believed that words had certain fixed, even sacrosanct, meanings that were rooted in religion, tradition and western mores.
Then I graduated and encountered the Bush administration

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