With political campaigns well under way, it is worth considering how the language we use to communicate has been corrupted with many words meaning anything and nothing.

Agents in public relations fields cynically take words that once suggested some virtue and manipulate them into something disdainful. By paying taxes into certain government programs people became entitled to benefits. Now those entitlements are being denigrated as scams or charity.

How much value can we place on a politician’s oath or pledge? Most politicians in Washington have abused the Constitution into a tool of political expediency, ignoring or applying it according to circumstance. At the same time they have rendered reciting the pledge of allegiance into an act of national hypocrisy. After the daily ritual of the pledge they proceed to be divisive often by perpetrating some injustice on others content to retain 50 percent plus one in their camp.

Historical and other myths are quoted as facts, perhaps in ignorance, with the hope that enough credulous people will be sufficiently gullible to be persuaded by them.

Some politicians piously profess we are a nation of laws but arrogantly advocate violations of national laws and ignore international conventions and treaties.

There was a time when one of the greatest compliments that could be made to another was to shake his or her hand and say, “Your word is good enough for me.” Not so much today and rarely with a politician.

Instead of euphemisms and other forms of deception there is a vital need for candor. If someone has a lesion on his or her body, the last thing that person should be told is that it is only a rash and to go home and take a couple of aspirins if the reality is cancer. This is but one of many instances when a hard fact must be faced.

The same is true in politics. A recent My Nickel’s Worth writer (“Political vitriol is extreme,” Jan. 18) was offended that words such as charlatan and thugs had been published in an opinion piece. Our nation’s political system is corrupt, as countless people attest, and the body politic has a cancer, so this is no time for insipid and evasive terminology. Let’s look at those words.

A charlatan is a fraud. Somewhere around 90 percent of the American people have negative opinions of Congress. Does that not suggest they consider many of the people in Congress to be frauds? If a politician is running for election and changes his or her opinions repeatedly to conform to polls or campaign donors’ wishes does that not suggest a mountebank? Or, do we call him or her a skilled rhetorician? The American people were deceived into supporting a war on Iraq. The talking points inevitably proved to be false and the case fraudulent. Now many of the same people who were peddling that fear-mongering are trying to inveigle us into a war on Iran. Would it not be judicious to consider they might again, at an absolute minimum, be charlatans? Wouldn’t serial betrayers of oaths and pledges and other hypocrites qualify?

A thug is someone who inflicts abuse on weaker people. If a police officer steps out of a phalanx of fellow officers and sprays a few obviously nonviolent students sitting on the ground with pepper spray is that not thuggish behavior?

Corruption of our language is nothing new. This is what George Orwell said in 1946 in “Politics and the English Language”: “In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line.’ Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.” (Nota bene: That last sentence.)