Stephen Pinker quotes that exact passage in _The Better Angels of our Nature_. He rebuts:

> Orwell was wrong about one thing: that political euphemism was a phenomenon of his time. A century and a half before Orwell, Edmund Burke complained about the euphemisms emanating from revolutionary France:

> "The whole compass of the language is tried to find sinonimies and circumlocutions for massacres and murder. They are never called by their common name. Massacre is sometimes called _agitation_, sometimes _effervescence_, sometimes _excess_; sometimes _too continued an excercise of a revokutionary power_.