War on words

In Politics and the English Language Orwell drills home the idea that sloppy language in the media leads to sloppy thinking about the world around us. The more emptily we use words like "Democratic" and "free thinking", to simply signify 'good' or to give a sign of our approval, the less we think. So long as a bombing was a democratic one, performed in the name of freedom, it's no longer a mindless massacre. It becomes 'collateral damage', a nice sugar coating for our poison pill.

The most recent version of this language slip as seen in the media is the expression 'War on...' to signal something we don't like. We don't try to hunt down terrorists and restrict access at our borders. We wage a 'War on Terror'. We don't hunt down petty drug thieves and lock them into prisons. We wage a 'War on drugs'. The meaning of the word 'War' - a violent conflict between two groups of people - is completely lost. The signifier has spun out of control. It now means 'a thing we disapprove of'. This article from the Guardian Weekly uses the expression in quotations in the same vein:

Oleksandr Antipov, 52, is recovering in hospital after having his fingers amputated. "We've lost this war with the cold," he said. His wife was also injured when they tried to fix a boiler in their home at the height of the cold spell.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,,1707571,00.html

How can you have a 'war with the cold'?????? Nobody seems in the least bit surprised with these curious metaphors which have slipped into everyday vocabulary when talking politics. I only see two purposes

1. We don't actually know what the situation is, and we use 'war' as a sort of loose bag which can hold pretty much any political activity. If I am campaigning to get a new traffic light, I am waging a 'war on lack of traffic lights'

2. We have watered down the word 'war' so much that we feel comfortable using it about anything and everything. We are so far removed from the reality of war that we think any conflict or action of conviction to be a war

It would be interesting to put the question to Orwell himself, if he were still alive, not only because of the weakness of the metaphor. Orwell joined the resistance to Franco's fascist regime in Spain, and was very committed to representing the reality of war.

I'd love to know what MGM or another such Hollywood studio would say if I were to propose the title of my new film 'the War on language clarity'. Might not fill the box office.