I spent part of my childhood mingling with Jehovah's Witnesses, which is probably why, when I was a bit older and briefly a member of the Labour Party Young Socialists, I could never take the Militant Tendency all that seriously. They reminded me of all those people who'd been eagerly waiting for the world to end in 1975. Our branch's Militant organiser - who never bothered to conceal his "entryism" - could never stop using the word "cadre". His eyes would glisten as he began to talk about "building cadres" from one end of the country to the other. In his mind anyway. I'm not sure he ever recruited anyone, although he was good at selling copies of the magnificently unreadable Militant newspaper.
According to their vocabulary and favourite cliches, you could smell out at once people with Trostkyite, Reformist, Brandlerite, Blanquist and other deviations. And vice versa, Communists betrayed themselves by their vocabulary to the police, and later to the Gestapo. I know of one girl whom the Gestapo had picked up almost at random, without any evidence against her, and who was caught out on the word "concrete". The Gestapo Commissar had listened to her with boredom, half-convinced that his underlings had blundered in arresting her - until she used the fatal word for the second time. The Commissar pricked up his ears. "Where did you pick up that expression?" he asked. The girl, until that moment quite self-possessed, became rattled, and once rattled she was lost.
Arthur Koestler, in The God That Failed
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