Exerpt from "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell 1946

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense 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 the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless 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. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

Excerpt from Complexity by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Take water, for example. There’s nothing very complicated about a water molecule: it’s just one big oxygen atom with two little hydrogen atoms stuck to it like Mickey Mouse ears. Its behavior is governed by well-understood equations of atomic physics. But now put a few zillion of those molecules together in the same pot. Suddenly you’ve got a substance that shimmers and gurgles and sloshes. Those zillions of molecules have collectively acquired a property, liquidity, that none of them possesses alone. In fact, unless you know precisely where and how to look for it, there’s nothing in those well-understood equations of atomic physics that even hints at such a property. The liquidity is “emergent.”
In much the same way, says Anderson, emergent properties often produce emergent behaviors. Cool these liquid water molecules down a bit, for example, and at 32 degrees fahrenheit they will suddenly quit tumbling over one another at random. Instead they will undergo a “phase transition,” locking themselves into the orderly crystalline array known as ice. Or if you were to go the other direction and heat the liquid, those same tumbling water molecules will suddenly fly apart and undergo a phase transition into water vapor. Neither phase transition would have any meaning for one molecule alone.
And so it goes, says Anderson. Weather is an emergent property: take your water vapor out over the Gulf of Mexico and let it interact with sunlight and wind, and it can organize itself into an element structure known as a hurricane. Life is an emergent property, the product of DNA molecules and protein molecules and myriad other kinds of molecules, all obeying the laws of chemistry. The mind is an emergent property, the product of several billion neurons obeying the biological laws of the living cell. In fact, as Anderson pointed out in the 1972 paper, you can think of the universe as forming a kind of hierarchy: “at each level of complexity, entirely new properties appear. [And] at each stage, entirely new laws, concepts, and generalizations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry.”