Good or Bad? It All Depends What Word You Choose

Propagandists (often called “journalists,” “pundits,” “commentators,” even “historians,”) have a wonderful smorgasbord of adjectives to use as tools or weapons to promote or degrade people, movements, nations, ideas, whatever, depending on the ideological and political ends being pursued.

Notice how the choice of the adjectives and nouns below depends crucially on the judgment of the person pasting the word onto the target:

Childlike – Childish

Hard-charging – Overbearing

Ambitious- Pushy

Outspoken - Shrill

Feisty - Obnoxious

Bold - Reckless

Cautious - Indecisive

Passionate- Obsessed

Committed – Stubborn

And of course there is the differential standards applied to one’s own killers vs. the enemy’s:

Heroic, Brave, Courageous - Murderous, Vicious, Bloodthirsty

Effective or Precision Weapon, Surgical Strike- Lethal, Deadly

Defense - Aggression. In the eye of the beholder, apparently.

There are differential nouns too:

Security services/ intelligence agencies/law enforcement/ - Secret police

And here's a verb/noun combination and the equivalent applied to enemies:

Defending freedom - Imperialism.

I guess the U.S. subversion and coup in Ukraine was "defending freedom."

 Famously, the shrill and obnoxious Ed Koch was labeled “feisty,” making a virtue of his awful personality. Koch loved to torture people psychologically, and was infamously indifferent to the opinions of others. (A fact that his slogan “How’m I doin’?” was intended to disguise.) Bella Abzug, of course, was “shrill” and “pushy.” (Koch was one in a string of right-wing mayors of New York City stretching back to the late 1970s, and Bella Abzug was a Congresswoman from the same city, famously paired with former CIA undercover agent Gloria Steinem as the bourgeois-approved face of feminism along with Betty Friedan.)

We just saw the fired NY Times executive editor Jill Abramson smeared in the media as “pushy,” a derogatory word never applied to her predecessor male pigs like A.M. Rosenthal (a total prick), Howell Raines (by all accounts an overbearing martinet) or Bill Keller. They were “demanding” and had “high standards,” perhaps, but weren’t “pushy” or “difficult” or “hard to get along with.” (Male sexists have a hard time getting along with female superiors, is the real problem.) Arthur Ochs “Pinch” Sulzberger, Jr, who inherited the paper from his Daddy, couldn’t stand the fact that Abramson criticized some of the paper’s cover-ups, and expected not to be cheated on her compensation. Turns out they’ve been cheating her in her last 3 jobs there- as Washington bureau chief, another editorial post, and finally executive (top) editor. Sulzberger paid her less than men in the same jobs, and then had the brass to lie about it publicly.

See "The facts show it: female CEOs are more likely than men to be fired," the guardian, 17 May 2014.