“Dittologica” is a neologism (or perhaps a pseudologism) concocted from the Greek-derived term “dittology”, which is commonly defined as “a double reading, or twofold interpretation, as of a Scripture text.” By extension, it could be said to mean “the study of duplicity” (ditto: “double” + -logy: “the study of”) or “doublespeak” (ditto + logia: “speaking”).
Dittologica is a blog for reasoning (-logia) about what underlies the doublespeak and distraction presented to us daily by the media and the mouthpieces of officialdom. Our culture is so deeply saturated by propaganda masquerading as “information” or “news” that we often fail to focus on the important stories. And if the media stop hawking a story it stops being news and slips out of the grasp of our collective consciousness.
This blog presents thoughts on double-speak media stories, usually drawn from current news and events. Occasionally the blog may veer off in a historical or even purely cultural direction.
Just for the record, in spite of my penchant for “deconstructing” texts and ideas, I am not an exponent of, nor do I even know much about, “post-structuralism” or “post-modernist” theory. My interest in the dittology of current ideas doesn’t have its roots in textual criticism or literary theory. Rather, it dates back to the days of the Cold War when Vietnamese villages were being destroyed to “save” them, religious fundamentalists in Afghanistan were called “freedom fighters”, and information on the “non-free” world was often attributed to shadowy “informed sources” and anonymous “experts”. I used to keep files of newspaper clippings documenting these stories, but in the course of several house moves and with the advent of the digital age these were dispersed to the four winds. The exercise of spotting such gems in the media has, however, remained a lifelong fascination.
Although most of my insights are neither unique nor original, I hope that my presentation of them at least puts an interesting twist on the subject matter and perhaps sparks an awareness of some detail that might otherwise have slipped beneath the reader’s radar.
