It’s a measure of a stagnant, mediocre political class that it substitutes ever-more flamboyant rhetoric for ordinary language.
A normal, common person might describe a meeting as “pretty good, but a lit too long.” By contrast, cheerleaders of all things status quo would describe that event differently: “The exciting and informative meeting, described by everyone in attendance as the best discussion on mushroom growing they had ever heard, was another landmark triumph for local agriculture, already among the most advanced in the nation.”
We’ve people who write about their own supposed accomplishments (often without disclosing their roles) in the stilted language of party apparatchiks.
Descriptions like this are silly to most people, who rather prefer plain-spoken, simple descriptions. There’s a lot of color in American descriptions, but it’s a lively, local flavor, free of tedious puffery.
Places that are troubled, that cannot overcome persistent problems — often because they will not even own up to them — are ones who speak with the stilted and excessive phrases of a party bureaucrat:
Comrade Yuri Yoshenko, a loyal citizen of our noble motherland, and humble worker from State Bakery No. 2357, successfully prepared seventeen-hundred crescent rolls for the Third Party Congress, in a record time of six minutes, thirty-two seconds. Selfless party leaders from across our eternal workers’ paradise, gathered to celebrate the latest advances in science, industry, and anti-fascist crowd control, commended Yoshenko for his unprecedented, accomplishment.
When asked how he was able to make crescent rolls faster than anyone else in this classless society, Yoshenko credited his unthinking commitment to the motherland, an unwillingness to fall victim to decadent practices of capitalistic exploitation, and a steady diet of wholesome rye bread & pure water from mountain springs.
Good job, Comrade! The workers of the motherland salute you and your courageous devotion to advanced, scientific dialectical materialism!
We don’t see commendations so extreme, because we don’t live in a country so ideological that every act is a political statement.
Sadly, a preening, third-tier elite (such an elite as it might be), will speak more like this than normal people will. They’ll talk and write as I satirized in my example about praise for a local meeting on mushroom growing. Nothing will ever be simply a good try, no job will be simply a nice effort but with room for improvement.
Most of all, no official will ever do wrong. Every bureaucrat and entrenched incumbent will be a selfless and noble public servant, reflecting only on the good of his fellow citizens, and always representative of the most advanced principles of his enlightened station.
It’s a lot of nonsense, nothing more than self-praise among the same circle of back-patters.