Wooden language and the Communist Youth Movement in Romania. The case of Interior Minister Teohari Georgescu

Abstract

Romania has first experienced the communist wooden language during the Second World War, after the act of August 23rd, 1944. The target group, called shunting mass, was composed of workers, farmers, young and old, people generally with low education and low living, willing to compromise their judgment in the face of better promises. In this case, we propose to analyze the wooden language of the first interior minister, Teohari Georgescu, on the communist youth movement. The context of the speeches consists of the late unification process of the movement, more specifically the setting of the Young Communist League in 1949. We analyzed two speeches, both in terms of content and the meaning of the text, since this is generally a mixture of political, ideology and exhortations addressed to young people in Romania, aiming their enrolling in the communist movement. Content analysis is related to the political realities of the time, and the grammatical take account of clichés and style for this type of language.