Quoting this answer to a related question:
George Orwell, in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, used the terms doublethink (the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct) and Newspeak (a controlled language of restricted grammar and limited vocabulary, meant to limit the freedom of thought). These two have been combined to form the term doublespeak (frequently incorrectly attributed to Orwell's 1984) meaning "language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words."
George Orwell first wrote about this type of use of language for political purposes in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language:
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of
the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in
India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom
bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which
are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with
the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has
to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy
vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the
inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle
machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is
called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms
and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry:
this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.
People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of
the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is
called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed
if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of
them.
Political consultant Frank Luntz, who by his own account was heavily influenced by reading Politics and The English Language, has in recent times become closely associated with the strategy of methodically crafting vocabularies for political purposes. Here are some examples of political neologisms attributed to him:
- Death tax (instead of estate tax)
- Climate change (instead of global warming)
- Government takeover (of healthcare)
- Energy exploration (instead of oil drilling)
Some of these examples work in the opposite way of what you are asking for though, making something look less neutral and acceptable.
