Beautiful and Sad

Today, describing an object, I described it as beautiful, but then found it necessary to correct myself: “not in the Trump sense of beautiful.” Language is an insidious thing; it changes flavor in a subtle way, and these subtle changes can propagate and multiply. Think of the word “sad” — how it has been transformed by the tweeds of our tweeder-in-chief! Think about the words “embedding” and “embedded” — who can innocently use them after journalists became “embedded” in the US war in Afghanistan under Bush? And that leads me straight to the abuse of language under the German Fuehrer: I was born into a country in which the words “Blut” and “Boden” (blood and soil) had been abused to the extent that they could no longer be spoken with heartfelt conviction or used in poetry.