For many years, it's been obvious that conservatives do a better job of manipulating language than liberals, not only because they seem good at coming up with new terms to describe things, but more importantly because once they decide on a new term, they very quickly get everyone on their side to use it. One of the classic examples is how they took the "estate tax," with its evocation of a white-haired gentleman named something like Winthrop Flipperbottom III sipping brandy from a gigantic snifter while petting his afghan hound as he looks over the vast gardens of his estate, and renamed it the "death tax," which evokes a cruel IRS agent bursting in on your family mourning the death of your beloved uncle and making off with his lovingly amassed collection of vintage baseball cards. You will never, ever hear a conservative call the tax anything but the "death tax," because they all understand the utility of language. How much these kind of linguistic efforts really affect the outcome of policy conflicts is debateable, and the left certainly tries to do the same thing, but few people would argue that over the past twenty or thirty years the right hasn't been far better at it. It doesn't happen by accident—there are people who come up with the new words and phrases, people who test them in surveys and focus groups, people who work to spread them, and then all the people who reinforce them with frequent use. It's a system, and it works very well.
All of which makes it so odd that it has taken until now for conservatives to realize that they have a real language problem, and what they really need is a little of the political correctness they've so despised in the past. As Garance Franke-Ruta of The Atlantic explains, not only are Republicans telling each other to shut up about the whole "legitimate rape" thing, but some of them are urging a change in how they talk about immigration...
