Newspeak and the subtle use of public illiteracy

Net migration total up by a fifth. - BBC News

'Net migration'. WTF is that? Emigrants or immigrants? Coming or going? Both, maybe? Sort of... yo-yoing? How can one know? This is not information but merely words. The phrase is entirely without content or meaning.

Migration simply means movement from A to B. It connotes and implies no quantity and no direction of movement. The word net is otiose. The writer is illiterate and innumerate. I suppose...  And there's little old-fashioned me thinking that the BBC News writers are all graduates and that all graduates are literate and numerate.

The term for which the BBC's writer is clearly not groping is net immigration, i.e., the value of the sum: (total immigration minus total emigration). To call the resulting value net migration  is mathematical nonsense and conceptual gibberish.

The BBC will not expect its audience to know that but, guess what? Some of us do. Some of us are at least as politically aware and at least as numerate and literate as - if not more than - those who control what we are allowed to know and what we may and may not say.

The liberal establishment and the Ministry of Truth always use migration when normal people would use immigration, a word now seldom heard from the Righteous. It is cos to say 'immigration' is racist? Well, yessiree, I do believe it is. And it must be stopped.

But maybe I am being too hard on BBC News. After all, the government office they are quoting, the Office for National Statistics, no longer uses the word immigration. Seriously. They use their own neologism, in-migration. Oh, and out-migration.

First control the language... 

For the sake of actual truth as opposed to what our masters would have us believe, here is the headline  rewritten in old money, to convey, you know, information:

Net immigration up 21% in 2010  - Planet Reality News Channel

How would that as a BBC headline go down in Annie's Bar?

'Good God, the arse has made us look like those racists at the Mail. Killed his Beeb career, of course. My round, I think, Ed. Pint?'   

UPDATE
The infection has become an epidemic. Even the Mail is using Newspeak:

Net migration is the difference between those arriving and leaving the country in 12-month period.

NO IT SODDING WELL ISN'T!

Bastards.

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