Thankfully, Henry Fairlie, the British journalist who gave us the word "Establishment" as used in its modern capitalized sense, expanis the manipulation of language by politics without resorting to platitudes. Instead he concretely traces the changes in meaning words undergo as they are drafted into service by politicians and journalists. "Ghetto," for instance, in retaining its original sense of the legal restriction of a group to a quarter of a city, reinforces a group's sense of isolation when attached to a minority like blacks, even though they are not subject to any legal restrictions. The word "ethnics," as another example, from "ethnic groups;" to say that one belongs to an ethnic group is to define only one of his characteristics, whereas to say one is an ethnic is to imply that this is his most important quality.

Such usage, Fairlie asserts, simplifies social phenomena in such a way as to isolate and segregate: thus, for example, " 'ethnics' are separated from nonethnics...the words themselves put people in 'ghettos,' and freeze them at opposite poles. It is in this way that we are manipulated by the words we tolerate and use." Fairlie echoes Orwell's warning against allowing abstract words to choose our thought and disguise from us the real meaning of what we want to say. But Fairlie is quick to differ with the author of "Politics and the English Language,""I have never been impressed with that essay," he writes, explaining that the politician is entitled to a language distinct from that employed by the man of letters, by Schlesinger's men of the "true word." The language of politics must be flexible enough to enable the politician to perform his essential role, which is obtaining a consensus from the disparate groups in society. "It is the task of the politician to persuade people to do things...and he must therefore be allowed to use his language to this end." As an example, Fairlie cites Lyndon Johnson's politicking to get the civil rights bill passed; to a group of southerners he would talk in conciliatory terms, to liberals he would sound forth on the landmark nature of the bill, to old New Dealers he would invoke the progressive measures of a past president.

WHAT,THEN,distinguished such benevolent maneuvering from the nefarious language employed by Nixon, who also could claim that he was attempting to build a consensus of social groups? Johnson was sincere, Fairlie responds; Nixon lacked conviction in his own values. And with this we see that at bottom Fairlie differs little from Newman, with his evil grin on his face as he turns to a page in the O.E.D., or from Schlesinger, aloft on a white horse and extending his lance-like pen. The precise-writing journalist, the university sage, the charismatic politician: in each case power is wielded by the few versus the many, and what each tries to pass off as a democracy is nothing but a literocracy, where the pure word, defined by those who KNOW, rules. That explains Newman's complaints about the deleterious effect of the '60s; that explains Schlesinger's admiration for the reason and clarity that abounded in the predemocratic era of the Founding Fathers; that explains Fairlie's protest against words like "ghetto" and "minority," which he claims isolate groups in society. Purity of speech and word is possible only when all groups in society share equally in the national wealth. Where some groups receive an unjust share, the oppressed will naturally raise their fists angrilly and shout words--jumbled, incoherent, even ungrammatical, but words nonetheless--that express their needs and thoughts.

Ghettoes will not disappear if he words is abolished. Not will minorities. If language is,in the end, a reflection of the society in which it is used--and all three of these writers agree at some point in their essays that such is the case--then no amount of manicuring on the level of words will rectify injustices in social reality.

Democracy will require more than literary appeals to consensus and true words. It will require another concept that is conspicuously missing from these discussions of writing: communication. Until groups in power stop dictating rules and regulations and take fuller account of grievances from those groups out of power, democracy will continue to be as elusive as it was during the verbicidal days of Watergate.

Otherwise, as Orwell said of war-torn England,"Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible."