Change (n): the act or instance of making or becoming different.
In (prep.): expressing a state or condition
Language (n): the principal method of human communication, consisting of words used in a structured and conventional way
And speaking of words,
Dictionary (n): a book or electronic resource that lists the words of a language and gives their meaning
Case in point: We’ve discussed gender-neutral terminology, like the transition of “chairman” to the gender-neutral “chair” or “chairperson”. This became widespread towards the second half of the twentieth century. So today, when one looks up “chair” in the dictionary, it’s not only a thing that you sit in, but now also “the person in charge of a meeting or of an organization (used as a neutral alternative to chairman or chairwoman)”. A similar definition exists for “chairperson”. This is legitimate language change, and so the dictionary follows.
No, this pertains to what I’ve repeatedly referred to as the continuum of beneficial and non-beneficial language change. Over on the non-beneficial side, we have the Brandeis type of situation in which common English words like “picnic” become candidates for “oppressive language”. We also have proposals like “differently-abled” – not sure if this effort to pretend that a disabled person is not actually disabled ever caught on.
But then we have words and expressions that are intentionally deceptive, something that the right particularly specializes in – things like “pro-life” for an anti-abortionist, “family values” for anti-LGBT, “death taxes” for estate taxes, “entitlement programs” for Medicare and Social Security, “elites” for progressives, “socialized medicine” for any kind of productive government intervention in health care, etc. etc. This is when non-beneficial engineered language change becomes downright evil. That’s when I consider “Orwellian” to be an appropriate descriptor. If that bothers you excessively, I could substitute “deceptive” or “dishonest”. But “Orwellian” conveys the connotation of a particularly insidious kind of dishonesty designed to achieve political ends.