>>>>>>It's probably historical: some languages got used to hidden sense and implicit talk. I am not a linguistic expert, so I could be wrong, but it might be that Russian language is the most double-speak phenomenon in this area.
>>>>>
>>>>>What about (ouch, forgot the exact name) of the language in "1984"? I read it recently in English.
>>>>
>>>>Isn't it "Newspeak"?
>>>>
>>>>That expression is hijacked today "Oh, downsizing is newspeak for 'laying people off'"
>>>>
>>>>Just as in "1984" they had "Minitrue" (the Ministry of Truth - in effect lies) nowadays we have the MetPol for London's Metropolitan Police.
>>>>
>>>>Incidentally, recently on a BBC telethon day, the woman who's presented the Big Brother reality show in UK since its start was asked, in a quiz, "Who is the leader of Oceania?" ... and she had no idea.
>>>>
>>>>Similarly many people bandy about the expression "Catch-22" without ever having read the book or really knowing what one is. That annoys me.
>>>
>>>I was watching a dvd of one of the old episodes of a show we had here (don't know if it was ever in England), called "Remington Steele", and in the episode, he was using a fake identity, and introduced himself to one person as "Milo Minderbinder".
>>
>>Wasn't that the show where Piers Brosman first shot to fame?
>
>That's the one. But I think, without checking, that it's Brosnan.
>
>>I once had a military-style jacket and put "Capt. Washington Irving" (Yossarian's mail censoring persona, you may recall) in the name slot. Some guy in a pub asked me what position I played in the team!
>
>I thought you'd have used "Major Major Major". Too blatant?

Yes.

One of the reason why I hated the film was that it couldn't include facts like how Major Major Major Major got his name, or the story of Chief White Half-oat's tribe's travails. And unforgivable was the inexplicable reason why they put Hungry Joe in the plane-crash (that made Doc Daniker a non-person) when he really eventually died of his nightmare, that of Kid Sampson's cat sleeping on his face and suffocating him.

And the later part of the film had the Minderbinder character TOTALLY over the top.

On the subject of the catch-phrase's misuse, I heard it in a TV ad "It's Catch-22: you want your coloureds to be clean but you don't want the colour to fade..." or summat like that. I'm like shouting at the telly, "NO! That's not a Catch-22!" (that's a quandary)