I stumbled on this today while reading the sports pages. I must have clicked on it by mistake as I have no interest in the Big 12 or their plans for extracting more money from the taxpayers. What caught my eye was the following:

The conference is seeking to deregulate the FBS rule that requires leagues to have at least 12 teams and two separate divisions in order to stage a conference championship game. He said there hasn’t been any noticeable resistance to that effort yet, that he expects the process to play out within the next six months and that the ACC is also seeking to have the rule removed.

“John Swofford and I have socialized it among the 10 FBS commissioners and there have been a few questions and there hasn’t been any significant opposition to it,” Bowlsby said.

The first highlighted portion takes weasel words to another level. What exactly is “deregulate a rule” supposed to mean other than “repeal the rule”?? He obviously prefers to avoid using the word “repeal” so he went with “deregulate” instead. I can only assume that means leave the rule in place, but never enforce it. Why would anyone ever do that unless you thought there would be some objection to repeal?

The second portion is a bizarre use of language. Who talks like this other than a bureaucrat or a confidence man? Again, the obvious word to use is “talked” as in “we talked about it.” Instead, he chooses a more slippery word that could mean anything and nothing in this context. The object here, the proposal to not enforce the rule, needs to be “socialized” like a feral cat?

Later in that piece:

“We could certainly take our two highest-ranked teams and have them play again but one of those teams would have won during the regular season,” Bolwsby said. “You have to question whether or not it’s fair to have to have that same team beat the other team again in order to get past it. I could capably argue either side of that. We think the rule ought to be deregulated but whether or not we would have a [conference championship game] once we get there, I don’t know.”

Again, who talks like this other than sociopaths?

This is something we’ve seen more and more of over the last couple of decades. It started in the Clinton years when the flaks from the White House would contest the underlying definition of common English words. They would dispute the premise of every question, no matter how benign. They reduced public discussion to a word cloud that meant whatever they thought would work in the moment. As a result, our public discourse has become oriental in nature.

This is not entirely without precedent. Human societies are often ruled by people who communicate with one another in an official language that is opaque to the masses. The most obvious example is the use of Latin by the Catholic Church in the middle ages. Other than conquered people, however, I can’t think of an example where the rulers spoke to the people in a pseudo-language unintelligible to the people. Perhaps this is the next turn of the wheel. Esoteric writing in the communications age will result in the use of esoteric speech, a form of English used by elites to speak over us in public. An Ivy League Esperanto.

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