Читать книгу Doublespeak - William Lutz - Страница 10
ОглавлениеAirline Doublespeak
After fighting the traffic all the way to the airport, parking your car in the expensive and overcrowded parking garage, standing in long lines waiting to check in, and then boarding your flight, you can at last settle back in your uncomfortable seat for your direct flight to Denver. Or so you thought. As the plane begins its descent into the Kansas City airport, you innocently ask the flight attendant why the plane is landing. After all, you specifically asked for a direct flight to Denver. Without batting an eye, the flight attendant replies, “It is indeed a direct flight; it just isn’t nonstop.”
Welcome to the world of everyday doublespeak. Through such unpleasant and sometimes even painful experiences, you learn how doublespeak affects your life. Someplace along the line, the airlines invented a distinction between the terms “direct” and “nonstop,” but the airlines forgot to tell you. When a lawyer who specializes in aviation law petitioned to put an end to what he called the “deception of airline passengers,” Mike Clark, a spokesperson for Pan American World Airways, denied that passengers were being misled: “It’s just a question of semantics,” he said.
If you travel by airplane at all, you quickly become aware of the doublespeak used by airlines. Only airlines can get away with calling four crackers and some artificial cheese spread or a package of twelve peanuts a “snack.” Trans Florida Airlines provides its passengers with a set of instructions to be followed “in case of a non-routine operation.” Other airlines give you instructions to follow in the event of a “water landing.” The little paper sack is “for motion discomfort.” At one airport, American Airlines transports its passengers from the departure gate to the airplane on a “customer conveyance mobile lounge,” which certainly sounds a lot more impressive than a bus. After all, you didn’t pay all that money to ride a bus, did you?
If you have ever arrived at the airport only to find that your plane is full, don’t charge the airline with overbooking the flight. Airlines prefer to call the practice of selling more tickets than there are seats on the airplane “space planning,” “capacity management,” or “revenue control,” which is part of their “inventory- management system” handled by “space controllers” who seek to avoid “spoilage,” or empty seats.
The next really important doublespeak you learn (after the distinction between direct and nonstop flights) is that you do not fly in an airplane or a jet plane or even an airliner. Sometimes you might fly in an aircraft, but far more often you fly in “equipment,” as in, “The equipment has arrived and is now being serviced prior to our beginning the preboarding process.” Or as in, “Ladies and gentlemen, because of a technical difficulty there will be a change of equipment. Will you please deplane at this time.” Of course, this last statement means the airplane is broken and won’t fly, so they have to get you off that plane and on another—if there’s some other “equipment” that works. If you want to know what kind of airplane you’ll be flying on this trip, just ask the ticket agent, “What’s the ‘equipment’ on this flight?” Without hesitation you’ll be told 727, L-1011, or something similar.
The airlines, I am sure, think that the word “equipment” sounds much more solid, reliable, and far less frightening than the simple, common, ordinary word “airplane.” But to me, flying is scary enough without feeling that I’m not even going to be flying in an airplane but in a piece of equipment, which sounds like I’m going to be thirty-six thousand feet from the solid earth surrounded by old washing machine parts, pieces of a 1948 Hudson, and a few leftover manual typewriters. I don’t want to strap myself into a seat on the “equipment”; I want to sit in an airplane.
Before you ever make it to the equipment, however, you must go through the “preboarding process,” as in, “Ladies and gentlemen, in a few minutes we will begin the preboarding process.” It’s not just preboarding; it’s a “preboarding process.” I live for the day when I will see someone actually “preboard the equipment.” I want to see someone board the airplane before boarding it, and I want to see the process someone has to go through in order to preboard.
Airlines like to talk about “carry-on items,” not baggage, as in, “All carry-on items must fit conveniently beneath the seat in front of you or in the overhead compartments.” Airlines never speak of first-class passengers, but always of “passengers in the first-class section.” And did you ever notice that, while there may be a first-class section, there’s never a second-class section? You probably ride in the “coach” section, as I do. American Airlines has even eliminated the first-class section. On their planes it’s the “main cabin.” I wonder, where does that leaves the rest of us?
The Doublespeak of Food
Even if you don’t fly very often, you can still find plenty of doublespeak close to home. On your next trip to the grocery store—or supermarket, as they like to call them these days—pay attention to the language of food and the food business. Little things in this business try to mean a lot.
Wegmans Food Markets in Rochester, New York advertised for “part-time career associate scanning professionals,” or what used to be called check-out clerks when I worked stocking shelves in a grocery store. Some of the clerks at the Pathmark supermarkets in New York wear nametags that list their job as “Price Integrity Coordinator.” What do they do? They check to make sure all the items in the store have the correct prices on them.
Before you rush off to the store that’s open twenty-four hours a day, you’d better check its hours. The Pathmark supermarket chain in New York advertised in bold headlines that their stores were open twenty-four hours a day, but then in small print there was the note, “Check local store for exact hours.” There are supermarkets in Williamstown and North Adams, Massachusetts that advertise they are “Open 24 hours a day. Hours: 9 am to Midnight. Sundays 12 to 6.”
In the food business, words mean money—your money. Use the right words, and people will pay more for the product. A study conducted by a Connecticut consumer research group a few years ago revealed that people were willing to pay 10 percent more for what they thought were natural foods. Almost 50 percent of the people interviewed approved of paying more for such foods. No one has ever accused the food industry of ignoring a trend, especially when it means making lots of money just by using a few meaningless words. An article in The New York Times Magazine for November 29, 1987, quotes William D. Parker, vice-president of meat merchandising for Kroger food stores, who was discussing the “natural” and “lite” or “light” beef products that have recently become hot items: “It’s a niche- market type item in upper-income areas where people have more money than sense,” he said.
Put the magic words on the package and you can jack up the price, even if the contents aren’t all that much different from those in the package without the magic words. “Lean” is a magic word, as in “lean beef.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines “lean” red meat or poultry as having no more than 10 percent fat. Now, I know that I’m supposed to eat lean beef, as opposed to fat beef, I guess. If that’s true, why do cattle ranchers spend so much time and money fattening up their cattle before selling them to the slaughterhouses, or meat processors, as they like to call themselves? Why not start a diet program for cattle, so we’ll have nothing but lean beef? Why not have “fat farms” for cattle, where they can lose all their fat before they end up on our dinner tables?
But the Department of Agriculture’s definition of “lean” does not apply to ground beef. In fact, the fat content of ground beef varies widely. The Center for Science in the Public Interest did a survey in 1988 and found that the fat content in “lean” ground beef ranged anywhere from 20 to 30 percent. Nor do you do any better with “extra lean” ground beef. The U.S. Department of Agriculture conducted a series of experiments in which they discovered that there was only one gram of fat difference between three and one-half ounces of cooked regular beef and the same amount of “extra lean” ground beef. And that single gram of fat (which is about one-twenty-eighth of an ounce) equals nine calories. For those nine fewer calories, you pay more for the extra-lean beef.
The National Academy of Sciences issued a report in 1988 pointing out that terms such as “lean” and “lite” are misleading. “Extra lite” doesn’t guarantee reduced calories. Under Federal rules the term may simply refer to a product’s color, flavor, or texture. “Lean” frozen dinners may use meat and other ingredients containing large amounts of fat.
While you may think you know what those magic words on food packages mean, you probably don’t, because those words have a special meaning that seems to be known only to the food manufacturers and the four government agencies that oversee food labeling and safety. For example, the word “enriched” means that vitamins, minerals, or protein have been added to the product, usually because these nutrients were eliminated from the food during processing. In other words, “enriched” simply means that the food is back where it started, nutritionally speaking, before it was processed. However, “fortified” means that vitamins, minerals, or proteins not originally removed or reduced during processing have been added as supplements, thus increasing the nutritional value the food had before it was processed.
As you probably guessed, there’s an exception to these meanings of “enriched” and “fortified,” and that exception is flour. Almost all the flour sold in supermarkets today is labeled “enriched,” because flour can be called “enriched” if the iron, niacin, thiamine, and riboflavin that were removed during processing are replaced. However, the zinc, fiber, copper, and other vitamins and minerals that were removed during processing don’t have to be replaced. So you want to buy “fortified” flour, not “enriched” flour, but the other food you buy should be “enriched” not “fortified.” Got that? Just when you thought you had their definitions straight, they still manage to confuse you, don’t they?
If you buy “dietetic” foods, you’d better be careful. According to current regulations, foods with such terms as “dietetic,” “diet,” “low calorie,” and “reduced calorie” on their labels must have either one-third fewer calories than the standard versions or fewer than 40 calories per 100-gram serving. The question, of course, is how many calories are in that standard version, whatever that may be. Moreover, some foods can be labeled “dietetic” and still have the same number of calories as the standard version, as long as they have a reduced sodium content. To top it all off, the calorie count on the label only has to be within 20 percent of the actual number of calories in the food. Thus, the frozen diet dinner that claims to contain only 200 calories can contain as few as 160 calories or as many as 240 calories; there’s no way you can know for sure.
So you skip the diet dinner and go for the “sugar free” or “sugarless” food, in the innocent belief that food labels mean what they say. Wrong again. “Sugar free” and “sugarless” simply mean that the food contains no sucrose, which is nothing more than ordinary table sugar. However, the food can contain honey, dextrose (which is corn sugar), fructose (which is fruit sugar), mannose, glucose, sorbitol, or any other of a number of sweeteners that contain just as many calories as sucrose. Isn’t that an interesting definition of “sugar free”? Don’t you think the food industry and the government should let you in on their private definitions of words, especially since it’s your health and waistline that are at stake? Remember, doublespeak is language that pretends to communicate but really doesn’t; it is language designed to mislead.
One of the most popular words in the food business these days is “natural.” Sometimes it seems as if everything sold in the supermarket is natural, including detergent, soap, shampoo, pet food, and candy bars. The meaning of the word “natural” is obvious, right? (If you answered “yes” to that rhetorical question, take a piece of paper and write a one-sentence definition of the word “natural” before you continue reading the rest of this discussion.)
In the food business, the word “natural” doesn’t mean anything. A food labeled “natural” or “all natural” can contain any number of chemicals, including flavor enhancers, thickeners, emulsifiers, and preservatives such as BHA and BHT. Does this list of ingredients agree with your written or unwritten definition of “natural”? The last time I looked, the dictionary definition of “natural” said something about “not artificial, synthetic, or processed,” but then maybe those government agencies and the food manufacturers don’t use the same dictionary you and I use. Maybe they use their own private dictionary, the one they write but forget to publish so you can read it.
In 1980, Consumer Reports magazine reported that “Langendorf Natural Lemon Flavored Creme Pie” contains no cream but does contain sodium propionate, certified food colors, sodium benzoate, and vegetable gum. When L. A. Cushman, Jr., who chairs American Bakeries Company, the Chicago firm that owns Langendorf, was asked about this label, he explained that the word “natural” modifies “lemon flavored” and the pie contains oil from lemon rinds. “The lemon flavor,” Mr. Cushman is quoted as saying, “comes from natural lemon flavor as opposed to artificial lemon flavor, assuming there is such a thing as artificial lemon flavor.”
Then there are “Pillsbury Natural Chocolate Flavored Chocolate Chip Cookies,” which contain, among other ingredients, artificial flavor and BHA. “We’re not trying to mislead anybody,” claimed a company representative, who explained that the word “natural” modifies only “chocolate flavored.” I guess you’d better brush up on the syntactic structure of modification if you want to be able to read food labels these days.
A great example of the doublespeak of food is the claim on the label that the product doesn’t contain something it wouldn’t contain anyway, a kind of negative doublespeak. For example, ajar of jelly or jam may have the words “no preservatives” on it. Since sugar is all the preservative jams and jellies need, they have never had preservatives added to them. The same is true for canned products, which are preserved by the heat of the canning process. So think twice before buying the can of corn or the jar of jelly just because it is labeled “no preservatives added.” You might also notice that these magic words are usually accompanied by that other magic word, “natural.”
The use of the word “natural” on products reached a certain degree of absurdity when Anheuser-Busch proudly advertised its newest line of beer, “Anheuser-Busch Natural Light Beer,” which the Miller Brewing Company derided, and then attacked. Miller correctly pointed out that beers are “highly processed, complex products, made with chemical additives and other components not in their natural form.” The fight between the two big brewers caused some concern in the beer industry. The Wall Street Journal quoted William T. Elliot, president of C. Schmidt & Sons, a Philadelphia brewery, as saying, “One thing they [other brewers] are worried about is all the fuss over ingredients. Publicity about that issue is disclosing to beer drinkers that their suds may include sulfuric acid, calcium sulfate, alginic acid, or amyloglucosidase.” So much for natural beer.
After eight years of trying to regulate advertising claims in-volving “natural foods,” the Federal Trade Commission decided in 1982 to give up. Companies are not required to make a calorie disclosure for foods that have such magic words as “energy,” “natural,” or “lite” on their labels. You’re on your own when you try to figure out what these words on any food label mean.
Deep-Chilled Chicken
Even that all-American food, chicken, can be the victim of deceptive labeling. You may have learned at one time that, at a temperature of thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, water and other things freeze. But chicken doesn’t freeze at that temperature, at least not according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the chicken processors, who consider processed chickens “fresh” not “frozen” if they have been chilled to twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Bill Haffert, the editor of the trade journal Broiler Industry, said in 1981 that the industry term is “deep-chilling” and that such chickens have not been frozen but “deep-chilled” and can therefore be sold as “fresh” chickens. Maybe the people who thought up this doublespeak should be packed in ice and have their temperature lowered to twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Then we could ask them if they’re “fresh,” “deep-chilled,” or “frozen.”
But even the twenty-eight-degree standard hasn’t really applied, because chickens are considered fresh and not frozen if government inspectors can depress the flesh of the chicken with their thumbs. So in 1988 the Department of Agriculture announced that it was considering a new policy. The word “fresh” could not be used on any chicken if it had been frozen or previously reduced to a temperature of twenty-six degrees Fahrenheit or below. The chicken industry immediately fought the proposed standard. It makes you wonder just how “fresh” all those “deep- chilled” chickens being sold these days are. The next time you buy “fresh” chicken, you might ask whether the chicken has been “deep-chilled.”
Picowaved Food
The latest innovation in the food industry is irradiated food, or food that has been treated with ionizing or gamma radiation to extend shelf life or kill insects. While ionizing or gamma radiation isn’t radioactive, it is suspected of causing chemical changes in food, changes whose safety has been questioned by some scientists and consumer groups. But the government and the food industry decided to go ahead with irradiated food.
Now, nobody in the food industry wanted to put the word “radiation” on a food package. As Ellen Green, a spokesperson for the National Food Processors Association, said, “The word ‘radiation’ is a scary word.” What, then, could the food industry and the Food and Drug Administration do? At first the FDA recommended that irradiated food carry labels referring to “gamma” and “ionized” radiation, but the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency with final say in these matters, opposed any form of labeling. However, the agency gave in to public pressure and sought a “creative” solution. It considered the labels “gamma” and “ionized” to be “too negative,” so it chose the word “picowave” instead.
The word “picowave” has no real meaning. It was created by a company in California and was designed to be similar to the word “microwave,” which is a completely different kind of radiation, but it’s a word very familiar to the public. Thus, foods that have been irradiated will be labeled “picowaved.” An industry spokesperson said that, “from a public relations standpoint, it is more pleasant to the ear than gamma radiation or electromagnetic energy.” Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler called the labeling “an important step forward for consumers.” Said U.S. Senator Howard Metzenbaum, “It’s the ultimate in untruth in advertising.”
Picowaved food will also carry an international symbol which looks like a little flower inside a broken circle. The circle is supposed to represent the radiation facility. There is a black dot in the middle of the circle, which is supposed to represent the source of the radiation, and the petals of the flowers represent the irradiated food. Before you buy the picowaved food with the cute little flower symbol on it, you might ask yourself what it is you’re really buying.
Mechanically Separated Meat
The next time you want to buy some hot dogs, sausage, luncheon meat, scrapple, or canned spaghetti with meat sauce, you might want to read the list of ingredients on the label very carefully. Does the list of ingredients include “Mechanically Separated Meat”? Do you know what MSM (as it’s called in the food trade) is? Here’s the recipe. Take the salvaged remnants of slaughtered animals, remnants that include bones, connecting tissue, and attached scraps of meat, pass this collection of scraps through a grinder, and then press the mixture through sieves until most of the bone is filtered out. (Some pieces of ground bone are always left in the mixture, but, hey, no process is perfect.)
Until 1982 this stuff was called “salvaged meat,” but for some reason it just wasn’t selling, probably because manufacturers were required to label the amount of “powdered bone” the mixture contained. Then the U.S. Department of Agriculture came to the rescue. Suddenly “salvaged meat” became “Mechanically Separated Meat” and the list of ingredients on a label would no longer have to include “ground bone.” All that would have to be listed was “Mechanically Separated Meat” and the amount of “calcium” in the average serving.
The meat processing industry still wasn’t happy, though, so in 1988 Bob Evans Farms, Inc., the Odom Sausage Company, the Sara Lee Corporation, and Owen Country Sausage, Inc. petitioned the Department of Agriculture to allow hot dogs and other products to contain up to 10 percent MSM without listing it as an ingredient on the label. Read those food labels fast, because soon even the innocuous phrase “Mechanically Separated Meat” will no longer be there. But don’t worry; the amount of “calcium” per serving will still be listed, because the ground bone will still be there.
Lite Up Your Life
Words sell food, and they sell beer, too, but you have to ask yourself what the words really mean. Diet beer was around for years, but it certainly didn’t sell. After all, what real man wants to belly up to the bar and order a diet beer? Them’s fighting words, partner. But along come the marketing geniuses of the Miller Brewing Company, who changed the word “diet” to “lite,” hired a bunch of ex-jocks to extol the virtues of “less-filling” beer, and sales history was made. So now it’s all right to drink diet beer, because it’s not diet beer, it’s “lite” beer.
We’re dedicated to becoming a nation of lightweights (or is that liteweights?). We’re watching what we eat. Even restaurant menus offer light meals and slim platters. No one really knows what a light meal in a restaurant is, except it seems to contain a lot of lettuce. We may not know what light foods really are or what makes them light, but when it comes to buying light foods in the supermarket we know one thing: They cost more. Today you can light up your life with any kind of food you want. There’s light milk, light spaghetti sauce, light frozen dinners, light mayonnaise, light cookies, light potato chips, light ice cream, and even light ketchup. Legally, a manufacturer can call a food product “light” even if it contains only a few calories less than a comparable product. You probably didn’t know it, but regular ketchup contains only fifteen or sixteen calories per serving. Now comes the light version, for more money, which offers eight to nine calories per serving.
The Cooperative Extension of New York State warned consumers in 1984 that, just because such words as “natural,” “light,” “life,” “health,” “nutrition,” “country,” “nature,” “harvest,” “fair,” and “farm” appear on packages (along with pictures of sheaves of wheat, farms, green valleys, streams of clear running water, and farmers toiling in the field), it does not mean the contents are farm fresh, wholesome, organic, or healthy. After all, when was the last time you bought a loaf of bread that was anything less than “fresh baked”?
The Fine Print of Food Labels
The next time you wander through the supermarket, try reading the small print on the labels of a few products. You’ll find Wrigley’s Orbit chewing gum is, according to its wrapper, “not non-caloric,” that Lance’s “naturally flavored” spice drops contain natural and artificial flavors, and that Original New York Seltzer claims on its label “no sucrose” but does contain “fructose syrup.” (By the way, it’s not made in New York, it’s not seltzer, and it’s not original, but just another soda pop.)
Nabisco’s 100% Bran contains wheat bran, sugar, malted barley flour, salt, fig juice, prune juice, and other stuff. So just what does “100%” in the name of this cereal mean? Or try Armour Potted Meat Food Product. Do you have any idea what a “meat food product” is? What does “potted” mean—that it comes in a can? The word “product” reminds me of those famous “meat by-products” in dog food. Take a close look at the label on this “meat food product” and you’ll find that it’s made of cooked beef fat tissue, partially defatted beef fatty tissue, and sodium erythorbate flavorings. Just like mom used to make.
The label on the Kraft Deluxe Macaroni & Cheese Dinner pro-claims, “Complete with rich, creamy cheese sauce. Made with a blend of natural cheeses and other fine ingredients.” Those “other fine ingredients” include milkfat, sodium phosphate, sodium alginate, and artificial flavor. According to its label, Durkee Grandee Spanish Olives are “stuffed with minced pimentos.” However, the list of ingredients includes not minced pimento but “pureed pimento.” Thus it is hardened pimento mush that is stuffed into the olives.
You can always try Café Français, an instant coffee that captures the famous flavor of the French recipe by using vegetable oil, corn syrup solids, sugar, instant coffee, sodium caseinate solids, trisodium citrate, dipotassium phosphate, mono- and diglycerides, silicon dioxide, artificial flavors, lecithin, and tetrasodium pyrophosphate. Of course, if you take “cream” in your coffee, there’s always your choice of Coffee-Mate, Cremora, Coffee-Rich, Coffee Dream, or any number of other brands of “non-dairy creamers” containing such nondairy ingredients as corn syrup, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, and one or more of the following oils: coconut, cotton seed, palm, and soybean. They also throw in some mono- and diglycerides, sodium caseinate, disodium phosphate, sodium citrate, and potassium stearate. But, don’t worry; your fake cream has been “ultrapasteurized.” I wonder when plain old pasteurization stopped being good enough?
The side panels on the package of Arnold Italian Crispy Croutons explains how, in the early 1800s, the French made croutons by cutting long loaves of bread into small pieces, drying the pieces, and then frying them in butter or oil. Then you read that “The delicious crunchy-crisp croutons in this package are directly derived from the original French dish, but the method of preparation has been adapted to modern lifestyles and standards.” The modern method of preparation includes adding such tasty ingredients as ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides, calcium propionate, potassium bromate, disodium phosphate, artificial flavor, and other touches to improve on the classic French recipe.
But at least bread is bread, you think, and the label on a loaf of bread is pretty straightforward. You’d better think again. According to the Code of Federal Regulations there are twenty- seven chemicals that can be added to bread, but the food manufacturer doesn’t have to list any of them on the label. Even for the ingredients that do have to be listed on the label, the manufacturer can use a little doublespeak. In 1985, the Center for Science in the Public Interest revealed that the source of “fiber” in a number of popular “high-fiber” breads was nonnutritional wood pulp. To reduce the number of calories and increase the amount of fiber in the bread, some companies had replaced some of the flour with alpha cellulose, which was sometimes listed as “powdered cellulose” among the ingredients on the package. None of the companies listed wood pulp among the ingredients. All of the companies defended their labeling as “not deceptive.”
The food companies have never let up in their efforts to use words that mislead. On the NBC-TV ‘Today” program on September 9, 1987, Richard Frank, speaking for the Committee for Fair Pizza Labeling, a food industry lobbying group, argued for the use of a “low-cholesterol cheese alternate” on frozen pizza. In other words, Mr. Frank wanted Congress to approve the use of fake cheese on frozen pizza, and he wanted to use it without calling it fake cheese.
At least you don’t have to read a list of all those ingredients on a bottle of wine. In 1981 the Wine Institute convinced the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to adopt a regulation that allows wine companies not to list all the ingredients in a bottle of wine. Now they can omit mention of such additives as grape juice, grape must, grape concentrate, yeasts, water, eggs (albumen or yolks), gelatin, casein, isinglass and pectolytic enzymes as clarifiers, ascorbic acid or erythodbic acid to prevent darkening, and sulfur dioxide and potassium salt of sorbic acid as sterilizing and preservative agents. Anyone for a glass of wine?
You can’t even say you’re getting a lemon when you buy foods like lemon pudding or lemon cake mix, because the lemons in these products are fake. In fact, you don’t need any lemons to make lemonade. In 1982 the Food and Drug Administration denied a petition asking that the word “lemonade” be restricted to products containing real lemon juice. Howard N. Pippin, speaking for the FDA, said that “we don’t know how much lemon juice it takes to make lemonade.” He conceded that, under FDA regulations, a product could appear with a label reading “lemonade,” yet contain no lemon juice. That’s just what’s happened, because General Foods’ Lemonade Flavor Drink contains no lemon pulp, lemon peel, or lemon juice. It does contain citric acid, gum acacia, and “nutritive sweetener.” When a consumer wrote to General Foods and asked how they could make lemonade without lemons, the company wrote back that “the aromatic or essential component of all citrus fruits is also referred to as ‘natural flavor’ and is derived from the oil sacs in the peel and not from the juice.” Anyone want to buy “lemon oil sac component pudding and pie filling”?
If you look at all those products that use the word “lemon” on their packages, you’ll find few if any lemons were used to make any of them. General Foods’ Lemon Deluxe Cake Mix contains citric acid, while Royal Gelatin Lemon Dessert has fumaric acid, and Jell-0 Lemon Pudding Mix contains fumaric acid and adipic acid for tartness. You also won’t find any lemons in any of those lemon-scented ammonia cleaners, oven cleaners, furniture polishes, furniture waxes, air deodorizers, toilet bowl fresheners, or detergents that have the word “lemon” in big letters or a big picture of a lemon on their packages. Search as hard as you can, but you won’t find a lemon in the whole bunch. How does Lemon Freshened Borax or Lemon Fresh Joy differ from non-lemon products? Since they don’t contain real lemons, we are left guessing what ingredient they do contain that makes them different.
Fake Food
One of the fastest growing segments of the food industry is fake food. What, you ask, is fake food? Fake food looks and tastes like the real product (or so the manufacturers claim), but it is made from a cheaper substitute and sells for a fraction of the cost of the real thing. To be more accurate, the fake-food industry sells its products to the retailer for a fraction of the cost. Consumers usually end up paying as if the fake food were the real thing.
Some “food technologists” (as fake-food inventors like to be called) don’t even call their products food; they call them “food systems.” Food technologists develop such things as “cheese analogs” (fake mozzarella) and “restructured muscle products” (fake steaks). When these “food systems” are used in restaurants, there’s no requirement that customers be told what they’re buying and what they’re eating.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture allows food processors to combine 135 parts of water with one part meat stock and still use the words “beef stock” instead of water on their ingredient labels. You can buy such fake foods as California Foolers, which are non-alcoholic versions of alcoholic drinks; and fake flavors (known as flavorgeins and flavor enhancers) such as butter, Mexican, Oriental, and Italian flavors. You can even get combinations such as nacho-flavored fortune cookies. Companies are even developing a fake barbecue sauce flavor and a fake mesquite smoke flavor. Soon you will be able to buy barbecue- flavored and mesquite-flavored food without the food ever having been near a real grill.
A number of Japanese companies ship large amounts of fake frozen crab meat (or, more precisely, a “surimi-based crab analog”) to the United States. Surimi is a fish paste made by pressing and repeatedly washing deboned fish. The fake crab comes in the form of sticks or shredded meat and is made from cheap cod plus starch, salt, chemical seasoning, “essence of crab” (which is derived from boiling down crab shells), and polymerized phosphate. Sales of imitation crab meat exceeded $100 million a year in 1984 and were growing rapidly.
There are many other fake foods. Fake scallops are made from codfish with “essence of scallop,” then compressed into cylinders and sliced to look like scallops. Canned red salmon is produced by using 30 percent real salmon plus cod with starch, salt, chemical seasoning, and synthetic red coloring added. Fake salmon roe consists of little orange-red colored balls made from seaweed gelatin, filled with salad oil.
Japanese fake-food manufacturers have also gone beyond fake seafood to fake beef. Using cod or sardines, the fake-food makers add salt and knead the mass until it takes on a gluey consistency. This mass is then put through an extruder and ethyl alcohol is added so that the protein becomes a mixture with the elasticity of natural beef. Meat flavoring and coloring are added so that the final product appears to be minced beef which can be used in hamburgers and other products.
Another process used to make fake beef takes internal organs, diaphragms, and waste meat from real beef and glues them together with adhesives made from egg white, starch, and gelatin. After a strip of real beef fat is glued along the edges, the product is frozen into the shape of a sirloin steak, a filet mignon, or a similar product. Food technologists boast that these products have the “mouthfeel” of real steaks. Ah, yes, beef is real food for real people.
You can also get surimi versions of lobster and shrimp, and the fake-food makers are busy working on surimi-based cheese, hot dogs, potato chips, and luncheon meat. The idea of fake hot dogs and fake luncheon meat is right up there with real virgin vinyl and genuine imitation leather. Surimi manufacturers protest that their products are not imitations. “Surimi isn’t an imitation anything,” says James Brooker of the National Maritime Fisheries Service. “It’s a seafood. It’s a blended-seafood product.”
One triumph of “food technology” (as the fake-food business is discreetly called) is the “gourm-egg,” developed by Ralston Purina and now ten years old (the technology, not the egg). A “gourm-egg” is a foot-long rod of hard-cooked egg suitable for slicing into seventy-five perfect center slices. Through the genius of food technology, the yolks of these slices do not slip out of the white rims, even if the slices do have the texture of gelatinous rubber and a vague, sulfurous near-egg aftertaste. But then think of all the work involved in shelling seventy-five real hard-boiled eggs.
Then there are “seafood curls,” developed by Griffith Laboratories. Using fake shrimp fried in “microwavable” batter, Griffith serves them crisp with a spicy dipping sauce. Such mouth-watering treats will soon be outdone, if Professor Endel Karmas, a food chemist at Rutgers University, has his way. He is developing “fish chewies,” a chocolate-flavored fish-based concoction with the texture of a soft Tootsie Roll. And you thought the greatest tragedy to befall American cooking was the death of the real hamburger.
Food technologists are not a humorless group. According to an article in The Wall Street Journal in 1986, a group of food technologists once concocted what they called “trash soups,” just for fun. The soups were made almost entirely of by-products: minced cod, scallop mantels (which are the greenish, rubbery protective lips found in scallop shells), and a broth made from the effluent of a clam-processing plant that, after using the water to clean the clams, had simply dumped the water as sewage. The soups, called New England and Manhattan Clam Chowders, were a big hit in taste tests and sold very well. In fact, the soups sold so well that the clam company, after the food technologists were finished with their little experiment, bottled the water it used to clean the clams and sold it as clam juice for $8 a bottle.
The fake-food business is so big that even the Riverfront State Prison in Camden, New Jersey has a program in which inmates produce “restructured beef,” which turns beef chuck into pieces looking like strip steak, chuck roast, and other cuts. The inmates process fifty tons of meat a month.
How successful are these fake foods? Japanese manufacturers claim that consumers are convinced they are eating the real thing. There may be some truth to this claim, since fake crab exports to the United States went from over twenty-two hundred tons in 1981 to more than forty-five thousand tons in 1986. Fake crab and other fake foods are used by U.S. restaurants in salads, sandwiches, soups, casseroles, and other dishes. So, the next time you dine in a restaurant, you might ask, Where’s the crab?
FOOD LABEL QUIZ
Now it’s time to test your taste buds, and your ability to read a food label. Take this short quiz and see whether you can identify some popular food products just by reading the list of their ingredients. Match the number of the product with the letter of the list of ingredients.
The Doublespeak of Everyday Things
I still haven’t learned to call “Directory Assistance” when I need a telephone number that’s not in the telephone book. I want to call information. But then I still use a toothbrush, and not an “oral hygiene appliance” or a “home plaque removal instrument.” In our everyday lives we encounter more and more doublespeak like these examples.
Plain thermometers have become “digital fever computers,” while the bathroom scale has become an “ultra-thin microelectric weight sensor.” The modern bathroom doesn’t have a bathtub, sink, and toilet, it has a “body cleaning system,” a “pedestal lavatory,” and a “water closet tub.” Should your “water closet tub” become clogged, you can always use a “hydro blastforce cup” (or plunger) to clear it.
Pacific Gas & Electric Company doesn’t send you a monthly bill these days, now it sends you “Energy Documents.” Hallmark doesn’t sell greeting cards, but “social expression products,” while Sony sells blank videotapes that come in the “Extra Standard Superior Grade.” Videotape stores will sell you “previously viewed videos” or used videotapes. You don’t buy ink, you buy “writing fluid.” A calendar is now a “personal manual data base,” while a clock is a “personal analog temporal displacement monitor” and a used wristwatch is a “pre-owned vintage watch classic, an estate quality timepiece.” Seiko sells “Personal Time Control Centers” not wristwatches. What was once a vacuum cleaner is now Hoover’s “Dimension 1000 Electronic Cleaning machine with quadraflex agitator.”
Automobile junkyards have become “auto dismantlers and recyclers,” and they sell “predismantled previously owned parts.” Secondhand or used furniture stores now sell “second-choice furnishings.” Spoiled fruits and vegetables are now “distressed produce,” while discount stores have become “valued oriented” stores. When you buy popcorn at the Strand movie theater in Madison, Wisconsin, you go to the “Patron Assistance Center,” not the refreshment or candy stand. And if you want to exercise, you can always go, not to the gym, but to the “fitness center.”
A company advertises that you can place your order by “electronic information transfer.” What they really mean is that you can telephone your order to them. Undertakers, some of whom now call themselves “perpetual rest consultants,” will sell you an “underground condominium” or cemetery lot, or an “eternal condominium” or mausoleum. Graves, by the way, are never dug but are “prepared” by those specializing in “internment excavation.” You can even make “pre-need arrangements.”
Beware of the Polls
Statistical doublespeak is a particularly effective form of doublespeak, since statistics are not likely to be closely scrutinized. Moreover, we tend to think that numbers are more concrete, more “real” than mere words. Quantify something and you give it a precision, a reality it did not have before.
We live in an age where people love numbers. Computer printouts are “reality.” You identify yourself with your Social Security number; your American Express, MasterCard, or Visa number; your driver’s license number; your telephone number (with area code first); your zip code. Three out of four doctors recommend something, we are told; a recent poll reveals 52.3 percent are opposed; Nielsen gives the new television program a 9.2; the movie grossed $122 million.
Baseball produces not just athletic contests but an infinity of statistics, which all true fans love to quote endlessly. Crowds at football and basketball games chant, “We’re number one!” while the Dow Jones index measures daily our economic health and well-being. Millions of people legally (and illegally) play the daily number. Millions of pocket calculators are sold every year. The list could go on to include the body count of Vietnam and the numbers of nuclear warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles cited as the measure of national security.
The computer scientist, the mathematician, the statistician, and the accountant all deal with “reality,” while the poet, the writer, the wordsmith deal with, well, just words. You may find, however, that the world of numbers is not as accurate as you think it is, especially the world of the public opinion poll.
If you believe in public opinion polls, I’ve got a bridge you might like to buy. Depending upon which poll you believed just before the New Hampshire primary in February 1988, you would have known that Robert Dole would beat George Bush 35 percent to 27 (Gallup); or Dole would win 32 percent to Bush’s 28 percent (Boston Globe); or that Dole and Bush were even at 32 percent each (ABC-Washington Post); or Bush would win 32 percent to Dole’s 30 (WBZ-TV); or Bush would win 34 percent to Dole’s 30 percent (CBS-New York Times). Of course, George Bush won the actual vote 38 percent to 29 percent.
Things weren’t much better on the Democratic side, either. While most primary polls were correct in identifying Michael Dukakis as the winner, the margin of victory varied from 47 percent to 38 percent. Dukakis won with 36 percent of the vote. For second place, though, the polls really missed the call. Two had Paul Simon ahead of Richard Gephardt for second place, while a third had the two tied and the others had Simon behind by a thin margin. In the actual vote, Simon finished third with 17 percent of the vote, while Gephardt finished second with 20 percent. No one predicted Gephardt’s 20 percent of the vote, not even the surveys of voters leaving the polling places after they had voted. This last point should not be overlooked, for it reminds us that no poll is worth anything unless people tell the pollster the truth. Since no pollster can ever know whether or not people are telling the truth, how can we ever be sure of any poll?
Things didn’t improve during the presidential campaign either. In August, 1988, before the Republican National Convention, seven polls gave seven different answers to the question of who was ahead. The CBS-New York Times poll had Dukakis leading Bush 50 percent to 33 percent, while a poll taken by KRC Communications/Research had Dukakis ahead only 45 percent to 44 percent. When the ABC News poll came out with Bush ahead 49 percent to 46 percent, many people in the polling business discounted the results. ABC promptly took another poll three days later which showed Dukakis ahead 55 percent to 40 percent. That was more like it, said the other professional poll takers.
Even as presented, such polls are deceptive. Any poll has a margin of error inherent in it, but pollsters don’t discuss that margin very much. They like their polls to have an air of precision and certainty about them. The KRC polls just mentioned had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent. This means that, in the first poll KRC took Dukakis really had anywhere from 49 to 41 percent, while Bush had anywhere from 48 to 40 percent. In other words, Dukakis could have been ahead 49 to 40 percent, or Bush could have been ahead 48 to 41 percent. The poll didn’t tell you anything.
Polls have become important commodities to be sold. Television news programs and newspapers use polls to show that they have the inside information, thus boosting their ratings and their circulation. Also, the more dramatic or unexpected the results of a poll, the better the chances the poll will be featured prominently on the evening news program. In addition to all this hype and use of polls as news, politicians, corporations, special- interest groups, and others have vested interests in the results of particular polls. Such people and groups have been known to design and conduct polls that will produce the results they want. In other words, polls can be and are a source of a lot of doublespeak.
How do you read a poll? Actually, it’s not all that hard, but the problem is that most poll results don’t give you enough information to tell whether the poll is worth anything. In order to evaluate the results of a poll, you need to know the wording of the question or questions asked by the poll taker, when the poll was taken, how many people responded, how the poll was conducted, who was polled, how many people were polled, and how they were selected. That’s a lot of information, and rarely does a poll ever give you more than just the results.
In 1967, two members of Congress asked their constituents the following question: “Do you approve of the recent decision to extend bombing raids in North Vietnam aimed at the strategic supply depots around Hanoi and Haiphong?” Sixty-five percent said yes. When asked, “Do you believe the U.S. should bomb Hanoi and Haiphong?” however, only 14 percent said yes. In 1973, when Congress was considering articles of impeachment against President Nixon, a Gallup poll asked the question, “Do you think President Nixon should be impeached and compelled to leave the Presidency, or not?” Only 30 percent said yes to this question. They were then asked, “Do you think the President should be tried and removed from office if found guilty?” To this, 57 percent said yes.
The most popular form of polling these days is the telephone poll, where a few hundred people are called on the telephone and asked a couple of questions. The results are then broadcast the next day. The two ABC polls mentioned earlier were based on telephoning 384 and 382 people, respectively. Just remember that the U.S. population is over 245 million.
According to Dennis Haack, president of Statistical Consultants, a statistical research company in Lexington, Kentucky,
most national surveys are not very accurate measures of public opinion. Opinion polls are no more accurate than indicated by their inability to predict Reagan’s landslide in 1980 or Truman’s win in 1948. The polls were wrong then and they have been wrong many other times when they tried to measure public opinion. The difference is that with elections we find out for sure if the polls were wrong; but for nonelection opinion polls there is no day of reckoning. We never know for sure how well surveys measure opinion when elections are not involved. I don’t have much confidence in nonelection opinion surveys.
The Doublespeak of Graphs
Just as polls seem to present concrete, specific evidence, so do graphs and charts present information visually in a way that appears unambiguous and dramatically clear. But, just as polls leave a lot of necessary information out, so can graphs and charts, resulting in doublespeak. You have to ask a lot of questions if you really want to understand a graph or chart.
In 1981 President Reagan went on television to argue that citizens would be paying a lot more in taxes under a Democratic bill than under his bill. To prove his point, he used a chart that appeared to show a dramatic and very big difference between the results of each bill (see Figure 1). But the president’s chart was doublespeak, because it was deliberately designed to be misleading. Pointing to his chart, President Reagan said, “This red space between the two lines is the tax money that will remain in your pockets if our bill passes, and it’s the amount that will leave your pockets if their bill is passed. On the one hand, you see a genuine and lasting commitment to the future of working Americans. On the other, just another empty promise.” That was a pretty dramatic statement, considering that the maximum difference between the two bills, after five years, would have been $217.
Figure 1
President Reagan’s misleading and biased chart, compared with a neutral presentation regarding the same tax proposals.
The president’s chart showed a deceptively dramatic difference because his chart had no figures on the dollar scale and no numbers for years except 1982 and 1986. The difference in tax payments was exaggerated in the president’s chart by “squashing” or tightening the time scale as much as possible, while stretching the dollar scale, starting with an oddly unrounded $2,150 and winding up at $2,400. Thus, the chart had no perspective. Using the proper method for constructing a chart would have meant starting at $0 and going up to the first round number after the highest point in the chart, as done in the “neutral view” in Figure 1. Using that method, the $217 seems rather small in a total tax bill of $2,385.
What happened to the numbers on the president’s chart? “The chart we sent over to the White House had all the numbers on it,” said Marlin Fitzwater, then a press officer in the Treasury Department. Senior White House spokesperson David Gergen said, “We took them off. We were trying to get a point across, not the absolute numbers.” So much for honesty.
Figure 2
Misleading graph from the Department of Education, showing school spending relative to SAT scores.
In 1988 the Department of Education issued a graph that seemed to prove that there was a direct connection between the rise in elementary and secondary school spending and the decline in scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (see Figure 2). The Reagan Administration had been arguing that spending more money doesn’t improve education and may even make it worse. But the chart was doublespeak. First, it used current dollars rather than constant dollars, adjusted for inflation. Because each year it takes more money to buy the same things, charts are supposed to adjust for that increase so the measure of dollars remains constant over the years illustrated in the chart. If the Department of Education had figured in inflation over the years on the chart, it would have shown that the amount of constant dollars spent on education had increased modestly from 1970 to 1986, as Figure 3 on page 51 shows.
Figure 3
Elementary/secondary education spending in constant dollars (billions).
Second, scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test go from 400 to 1,600, yet the graph used by the Education Department (Figure 2) used a score range of only 800 to 1,000. By limiting the range of scores on its graph, the department showed what appeared to be a severe decline in scores. A properly prepared graph, shown in Figure 4, shows a much more gradual decline.
The Department of Education’s presentation is a good example of diagrammatic doublespeak. Without all the information you heed in order to understand the chart, you can be easily misled, which of course was the purpose of the chart. You should always be skeptical whenever you see a graph or chart being used to present information, because these things are nothing more than the visual presentation of statistical information. And as for statistics, remember what Benjamin Disraeli is supposed to have said: ‘There are three kinds of lies—lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
Figure 4
More Education Doublespeak
In 1977 the Houston Chronicle reported that the father of a high school student received the following note from the school principal, inviting him to a meeting:
Our school’s Cross-Graded, Multi-Ethnic, Individualized Learning Program is designed to enhance the concept of an Open-Ended Learning Program with emphasis on a continuum of multi-ethnic academically enriched learning, using the identified intellectually gifted child as the agent or director of his own learning. Major emphasis is on cross-graded, multi-ethnic learning with the main objective being to learn respect for the uniqueness of a person.
Two more paragraphs of similar language followed.
As noted in Chapter I, the doublespeak flows pretty thick in the world of education, where it is used to make what is pretty ordinary—teaching children and running a school—sound very complex and difficult. Doublespeak in this realm can also be used to avoid some harsh realities and to soothe some hurt feelings.
The Parkway School District of West St. Louis County, in its Report to the Community 1987–88,
expresses the belief that the success of its students can be maximized through the development of a comprehensive Wellness Program targeted toward assisting the total community—employees, students and parents—in maintaining optimal wellness. The Wellness model is a comprehensive program that includes the physical dimension (fitness and nutrition), the social dimension, the intellectual dimension, and occupational, emotional and spiritual consideration.
I would be surprised if anyone in that school district had the faintest idea what all this verbiage meant, but it sure sounds impressive, doesn’t it?
Sometimes it seems as if schools are competing with each other for the thickest doublespeak. The St. Vrain Valley School District in Longmont, Colorado published a booklet titled Blueprint for Excellence, in which it announced, “Our mission is to educate students so they may approach their full potential in: Pursuing post-secondary educational endeavors. Achieving economic self-sufficiency. Continuing their personal pursuit of learning throughout life. Relating successfully to people, institutions and value systems in all aspects of life.”
Once they had impressed everyone with this education doublespeak, the writers of the booklet translated it for their readers. In clear language, they stated that what their schools-tried to do was make sure that “Students were prepared to succeed in college, business or vocational school. Students are able to support themselves financially. Students are eager to learn wherever they go. Students are able to get along with people.” Now, why didn’t they just say that in the first place?
Simple, clear language just isn’t impressive enough for many people in education. It seems they want to impress others with how hard their jobs are and how smart they have to be in order to do their jobs. After all, if anyone can understand it, then it can’t be very special. So the doublespeak flows, especially when it comes time to write a grant proposal. After all, in order to get the government or a foundation to give you money, you’ve got to convince officials that what it is you’re going to do with their money is worth doing and only you can do it.
As part of its proposal for a Title III grant from the federal government, a community college in Washington stated this as one of its major goals: “To organize a comprehensive process of assessment, teaching strategies, learning support, and intervention which effectively promotes student success in acquiring the skills and knowledge leading to satisfying and productive lives.” Of course, they would never have gotten their grant if they had written something like, “We’re going to teach these kids so they learn what they need to know to get along in life.”
Education doublespeak, especially among academics who want to impress everyone with how intelligent they are, has been around for a long time. Even W. S. Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) commented on it, as you can see in these lyrics he wrote in 1881 for a song in the opera Patience:
If you’re anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line as a man of culture rare,
You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant them everywhere.
You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your complicated state of mind,
The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.
And everyone will say,
As you walk your mystic way,
“If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me,
Why, what a singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!”
A glance at most academic journals would leave readers overwhelmed by academic doublespeak and nodding their heads in agreement with Gilbert’s lines. But this is to be expected, says Professor Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. According to Armstrong, there are some important rules to follow if you want to publish an article in a scientific or medical journal. In an article in a 1982 issue of the Journal of Forecasting, Armstrong recommends that the aspiring scholar choose an unimportant topic, agree with existing beliefs, use convoluted methods, withhold some of the data, and write the article in stilted, obtuse prose. Armstrong reports that, in one study, academics reading articles in scientific journals rated the authors’ competence higher when the writing was less intelligible than when it was clear. Other studies conclude that obscure writing helps those who have little to say. In other words, in academia, as in most professions, doublespeak pays.
A recent issue of the American Sociological Review carried an article that stated,
In effect, it was hypothesized that certain physical data categories including housing types and densities, land use characteristics, and ecological location, constitute a scalable content area. This could be called a continuum of residential desirabilities. Likewise, it was hypothesized that several social strata categories, describing the same census tracts, and referring generally to the social stratification system of the city, would also be scalable. This scale could be called a continuum of socio-economic status. Thirdly, it was hypothesized that there would be a high positive correlation between the scale types of each continuum.
In ether words, rich people live in big houses in nice neighborhoods.
Not to be outdone by the sociologists, the prestigious journal PMLA (for Publications of the Modern Language Association, a major organization of scholars of English and foreign languages and literature) published an article in its October 1981 issue that contained this gem:
We have now come to see, however, that the partitioning of art and history derives from a false dichotomy. Historical awareness is a construing of records already encoded, which can only be interpreted according to a historical poetics. And Active ideologies are the stuff of history, which must be comprehended by linguistic and dramatistic analysis. All cultural phenomena are artifacts, at once real and Active. This binocular perspective enables us to restore enacted courtesy, courtesy as lived, to the realm of poetic performance and to consider anew what such a way of living would have been like.
The entire article and most of the issue were written in similar prose, as is every issue of the journal.
A 1972 issue of the Antioch Review carried a review that contained such typical scholarly prose as this: “. . . Monod is constrained to use the word ‘teleonomy,’ which stands for living ‘objects endowed with a purpose or project,’ and which includes the genetic replication of such purpose. Yet in no way is this to be confused with ‘teleology’ à la Aristotle, or with final causation, and certainly not with ‘animism,’ which is the projection of organic teleonomy into the universe itself. This is the author’s bête noir, and his stable extends from Plato through Leibnitz and Hegel, down to dialectical materialism. . . .” After reading these examples of scholarly prose, we can better understand “the germs of the transcendental terms” Gilbert was writing about over one hundred years ago. As we have seen, scholarly prose hasn’t changed much since then.
In their article, “Needs Assessment and Holistic Planning,” published in the May 1981 issue of Educational Leadership, authors Roger Kaufman and Robert Stakevas point out that “in order to achieve products, outputs, and outcomes through processes, inputs are required.” An article titled “The Collection of Data About the Nature and Degree of Curriculum Implementation,” published in the January 1985 issue of the CCSEDC Quarterly, states that “the significantly lower scores of implementers in their informational, personal, and management concerns suggest the wisdom of investigating means to raise these concerns, perhaps through increasing curriculum visibility.”
Drop into any meeting of just about any academic society, organization, or group, and you’ll find even the titles of the papers being presented incomprehensible. At the 1984 meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, there were papers on “Visual Complexity in Television News: A Times Series Analysis of Audience Evaluations of an Electronically Estimated Form Complexity Variable” and “Elaborating the Relationship Between TV Viewing and Beliefs About the Real World: Possible Contingent Variables.” Or, if you had attended the 1988 meeting of the Academy of Management, you could have heard this paper presented: “Enter and Die: Effects of Incumbents’ Waiting Periods on the Duration of Industry Entrants’ Participation in 5 Subfields of the Medical Diagnostic Imaging Industry (1959–1986).”
At the annual meeting of the Mid-South Educational Research Association in 1985, a paper on reading comprehension among Navy recruits included this sentence: “The inferential analysis on high school graduation status indicates that higher percentages of high school graduates are included among the recruits during and immediately following the periods of enlistment restrictions to primary high school graduates.”
At the 1988 conference of the American Sociological Association, one panelist said that “In the emphasis on diversity, the notion of a hegemonic sexual discourse is deconstructed, even among those who claim to have one.” The speaker then went on to say that the “exploration of sexuality within feminism is attentive to the postmodern concern with the multiplying mutations of the self.” Other phrases that popped up were “democratic hegemony,” “distributionally conservative notions,” “inequalities in the sex-gender system,” and the “discourse of status ambivalence in clothing and fashion.”
In 1987 Princeton University Press published The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830–1980, by Lisa Anderson, a book whose prose is illustrated by this sample sentence:
It is also an argument for taking the variation in the periphery as a starting point for investigation and, more importantly, for examining the historical interaction of indigenous and foreign notions of political authority, structures of domination and mechanisms of appropriation as they combine to create the unprecedented circumstances and institutions of politics in the modern periphery.
It’s probably not surprising to learn that teachers like that kind of writing. Although English teachers like to say they prefer the clear, simple style in writing, when given a choice they tend to choose the heavy, ponderous style. In the September 1981 issue of College English, a journal read by a great number of college writing teachers, Professors Rosemary Hake of Chicago State University and Joseph Williams of the University of Chicago reported on research in which they asked English teachers in high schools and colleges to judge groups of student essays. In each group of essays, Hake and Williams included several pairs of essays that differed only in their style.
The results were depressing. The teachers consistently preferred the essays that had sentences such as, “The absence of priorities and other pertinent data had the result of the preclusion of state office determinations as to the effectiveness of the committee’s actions in targeting funds to the areas in greatest need of program assistance.” The teachers consistently gave lower ratings to the essays that were written with sentences such as this: “Because the state office set no priorities and did not have pertinent data, it could not determine how effectively the committee targeted funds to those areas whose programs most needed assistance.” Both of these sentences say the same thing, only the second says it more directly and more clearly. It has all the attributes teachers say good writing should have. Yet teachers overwhelmingly chose the first sentence over the second. Even those of us who should know better can be lured by the siren song of doublespeak.
At times it seems as if everyone involved in education lives on doublespeak, which starts at the top and flows downward. The Omnibus Education Act, passed by the Florida State Legislature in 1984, changed some terminology in the Florida statutes dealing with remedial education. In place of “remedial and developmental instruction” there is now “college preparatory instruction,” while “remediation” has become “additional preparation” and “remedial courses” has become “college preparatory adult education” or “college preparatory instruction.” At its October 1986 meeting, the State Board of Education in Ohio adopted a series of recommendations presented by its literacy committee, including these: “As early as a student is identified as an underachiever, an individualized intervention program with multiple teaching approaches should be developed” and, “An ongoing marketing approach should be implemented to provide the outreach necessary to find the unserved adult illiterate population.”
The Troy, New York School Board passed the following resolution at one of its meetings in 1983: “Resolved, that the Superintendent be authorized to engage a consultant in public school administration for the purpose of assisting the Superintendent to plan a study to make specific recommendations in regard to the planning for management use and allocation of personnel and material resources particularly in the following areas. . . .” In 1984 the Amarillo, Texas Independent School District Board of Trustees hired two consultants to help in the search for a new school superintendent. The consultants wrote a public opinion survey that contained such sentences as these: “Each item in the instrument is productivity-oriented. Pupil Products expected are itemized first. Production Systems present in the district are itemized second.” The National Testing Service Research Corporation of Durham, North Carolina prepared a report in 1980 on the results of a program designed to attack functional illiteracy among adults. The quality of this report can be illustrated by this sample of the prose used in the report: “The conceptual framework for this evaluation posits a set of determinants of implementation which explains variations in the level of implementation of the Comprehensive Project. . . .”
The doublespeak flows also into the classroom, with textbooks, lectures, and course materials filled with it. The following is the description of a graduate course in anthropology at the City University of New York:
As macro-processual interpretations come increasingly to seem, to historians, to falsify the complex multidirectionalities of local-level phenomena, and as community-based ethnographies come increasingly, in anthropology, to be situated within these same macro-processes, the framework for a synthesis between anthropology and history that has been building over the past twenty years, and that has achieved some substantial success, is starting to come apart, and is doing so in ways that can not be remedied by a return to earlier, more particularistic concerns.
Potsdam College of the State University of New York offers a course called “Clinical Techniques in the Human Services,” which is described as focusing on “Theory and issues regarding clinical practice with major processes in human services including contingency management, supportive therapy, assertiveness training, systematic desensitization and cognitive restructuring.” The description for the “Nursing II” course at Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey states that the course “focuses on the care of clients throughout the life cycle who have basic alternations in health status. Stresses a multidimentional approach and encompasses . . . the amelioration of the health status of the client. The restoration of health a major focus.”
At least the people in the St. Vrain Valley School District could translate their doublespeak. Most users of education doublespeak don’t have the faintest idea what they’re talking about when they use doublespeak. They sure sound impressive, though, enough so that you would never dare question what it is they’re saying lest you appear ignorant and uninformed. Many of those who use doublespeak hope for this reaction. When one school board voted to deny funds for a new swimming pool, the high school principal simply submitted a proposal for an “Aquatic therapy department” for handicapped children and promptly got his new swimming pool.
Remember the old days when there were physical education classes? Well, physical education is out of date; it’s now called “human kinetics” or “applied life studies.” Sports are called “movement exercises.” In 1988, officials of the University of Minnesota School of Physical Education wanted to rename their school the School of Human Movement and Leisure Studies. Michael Wade, the school’s director, defended the proposed name change by explaining that other universities call their phys ed schools by such impressive names as “School of Kinesiology” or “School of Sport Exercise Science.” (After all, Colorado State University changed the name of its phys ed department to the “Exercise and Sports Science Department” in 1986.) Wade noted that the old name put his faculty at a disadvantage when seeking grants, since the name of his school was not as impressive as the names used by those other schools. Wade also noted that there are two “journals of human movement” read and respected by professionals in the field. At last report the board of regents wasn’t too keen on the idea, but Wade planned to continue his efforts.
Colleges no longer raid each other’s faculties for big-name scholars. “Raiding isn’t the right phrasing; it’s selective development,” said George Johnson, president of George Mason University. In Indiana they have a program called “quality recovery,” while in Minnesota it’s called “preventive retention.” Colleges don’t talk of looking for students to boost their enrollment. Instead, they talk about “posturing ourselves aggressively and positively to enhance our position in the enrollment marketplace” and “aggressively enhancing retention through positive recruitment and advisement programs.”
Parents are told “there will be a modified English course offered for those children who achieve a deficiency in English.” Children who talk to themselves “engage in audible verbal self-reinforcement,” while children who disrupt class have an “attention deficit disorder.” And children who have poor “graphomotor representation” just have lousy handwriting. Kids don’t even cheat on tests anymore. According to a 1985 report by the Chicago Board of Education, an audit of scores on a reading test showed that “something irregular happened that can’t be explained by chance.”
Teachers are “educators” these days, or “classroom managers,” or “learning facilitators” who possess effective “instructional delivery skills” which they demonstrate in “microteaching sessions.” Teaching is called the “learning process” and learning is called “adjusted behavior.” Students don’t study, they spend “time on task” in their “learning environment.” Students who skip school don’t have to worry about the truant officer. If they live in New York they worry about the “attendance teacher.” My eight-year-old stepdaughter has already become so imbued with education doublespeak that she insisted she did not take swimming lessons. It’s “instructional swim,” she informed me and her mother.
Teachers rarely test students these days. Instead they “implement an evaluation program,” “conduct a needs assessment,” (or, better yet, “implement a needs assessment strategy”), or prepare an “analysis of readiness skills” using an “evaluation tool (or instrument).” At Taft Junior High School in San Diego, California, students don’t pass a grade, they “articulate.” When students select the subjects they want to take in the next grade, it’s called “articulation.” Students ride to school on a “transportation component” which is operated by a “certified adolescent transportation specialist.” When teachers go on a camping trip, it becomes an “outdoor education interdepartmental articulation conference.” Even the coaches get in on the doublespeak when they call a stopwatch an “ascending timing device” or a “descending timing device.”
The best schools are up on all the latest theories in education. First, you should remember that the very best schools aren’t schools at all but “primary or secondary educational institutions” where “empirical–rational,” “normative–re-educative,” or “power–coercive” strategies of learning address the “situational parameters” through a variety of “implementation approaches,” taking into account “multidisciplinary methodologies” in an “ecocultural framework,” as educators develop “brain-based programs” of “content-specificity.” Dedicated teachers, while worried about the burden of “excessive horizontal job enlargement,” will still engage in a “healthy interface” in a “dual-communication mode of highly interactive student-oriented teacher methodology” designed to promote and enhance a child’s “learning style” in “life-coping skills.”
Teachers have learned to translate the doublespeak of educational researchers, administrators, and public officials. When the Illinois Board of Higher Education said “internal reallocation,” “institutional self-help,” “negative base adjustment,” “productivity increases,” and “personal services,” teachers knew that the board meant budget cuts. Teachers knew also that “financial exigency” meant layoffs, and “institutional flexibility” meant administrators can do whatever they want without consulting the faculty as to the effect their decisions will have on the quality of the education offered to students. And “deferred maintenance” meant not doing needed painting, cleaning, and minor repairs, while “substantial deferred maintenance” meant not doing major repairs.
In Rochester, New York, a memorandum was sent to all teachers in independent school district no. 535 in 1983 offering “Staff Development Workshops” for those “who are considering, or would like to investigate a change of careers.” The workshops were designed for those teachers who were being laid off and to encourage others to leave the teaching profession voluntarily. That’s one way to develop the staff. The school board in the Cleveland, Ohio school system did not lay off 141 administrators in 1982, it “nonrenewed” them.
Wherever teachers turn, they are confronted with doublespeak. A research report published by the Educational Testing Service in 1985 on how children learn to read said that “The children’s preference for strategy was most clearly evident when they were near the limits of their capacity and needed to allocate their resources to optimal advantage.” The Wharton Executive Education Program at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business does not make a profit but runs a “negative deficit.” Educational researchers write of “knowledge-base possessors” and “knowledge-base non-possessors.” When Texas passed a law in 1985 preventing students who have grades of “F” from participating in such extracurricular activities as football, Eddie Joseph, president of the Texas High School Coaches’ Association, said of such students, “They’re not failing; they’re deficient at a grading period.”
Doublespeak permeates all areas of society, so there is no reason why education shouldn’t be infected as well. However, education doublespeak is particularly depressing because, more than anyone, teachers should be aware of doublespeak. They should be leading the fight against doublespeak by teaching their students how to spot it, how to defend themselves against it, and how to eliminate it in their own writing and speaking. Unfortunately, too many in education have found that using doublespeak can advance their careers and their pay, so they have decided to give in to it.
Doublespeak in Medicine
You may have a gall bladder operation, but to the surgeon it’s a cholecystectomy. You come down with a cold, but the doctor calls it simple acute rhinitis, or coryza. You have a black eye or a shiner, but the doctor calls it hematoma of the eyelid. Medical doublespeak? No, not at all. Just because doctors talk in that technical language of theirs doesn’t mean they’re using doublespeak. The foregoing examples are simply precise medical terms, and there’s nothing wrong with them, as long as doctors use them among themselves. But there is plenty of other language used in the medical profession that is pure doublespeak.
After developing a new machine that uses sonic waves to crush kidney stones, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital called the machine the “extracorporeal shockwave lithotripter,” which makes you want to ask if this tripter was necessary. Then there’s the article in the American Journal of Family Practice that called fleas “hematophagous arthropod vectors.” Try using that in the song, “My Dog Has Fleas.” If you leap off a tall building you will, in the words of the medical profession, suffer “sudden deceleration trauma” when you hit the ground.
In today’s medical doublespeak, aging is called “cell drop out,” or the “decreased propensity for cell replication.” There are hospitals that don’t treat sick people anymore; instead, the patient is called “a compromised susceptible host.” At Madison General Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin, members of the clergy who are on the staff belong to the “Human Ecology Department,” while janitorial services are performed by the staff of “Environmental Services.” At Memorial Hospital in South Bend, Indiana, the shop for wheelchair repairs is called the “Assistive Devices Resource Center.” In another hospital, the sign posted over the microwave oven in the nurses’ lounge lists the “rethermalization times” for different foods.
Patients aren’t constipated anymore, they just suffer from “wheelchair fatigue,” or an “alteration in self-care ability,” or an “altered elimination status.” Hospitals don’t treat VD (for venereal disease) or even STD (for sexually transmitted disease), they treat “STI” (for sexually transmitted infection). No one is addicted to drugs these days; now it’s just a “pharmacological preference.” If you’re not sure whether the problem is alcoholism or drug addiction, you can just use the term “chemical dependency” or “substance abuse.” Researchers talk of the “pharmacological reward” that cocaine induces. But then maybe Timothy Leary doublespoke it better when he said he preferred to call the war on drugs “a war on neurotransmitters.” With language like that he should go far in the medical profession.
Even psychiatry is getting in on the act. Now, the language of psychologists and psychiatrists has always been pretty bizarre, but, just when we catch on to one of their terms, they change it. Take, for example, “neurosis.” Psychiatrists no longer use the word. Has it become a dirty word? “No,” says Dr. Robert L. Spitzer. “It’s just not a very salient concept anymore.” Instead, psychiatrists speak of “vulnerability,” so some of us are simply more “vulnerable” than others.
Medical doublespeak is often used to make something ordinary sound complicated. After all, it’s easier to charge those big fees if what you’re doing sounds really difficult. After giving President Reagan a routine physical examination, Dr. Daniel Ruge said that “previously documented decrement in auditory acuity and visual refractive error corrected with contact lenses were evaluated and found to be stable.” That sounds a lot more technical than saying the president’s hearing and eyesight haven’t changed since his last examination and he doesn’t need new contacts or a stronger hearing aid.
Operating on President Reagan after the president had been shot, Dr. Benjamin Aaron said he had located the bullet lodged in the president’s lung by “very concentrated tactile discrimination.” In other words, he let his fingers do the walking. When the president underwent a medical examination in 1988, he was given a pain-killing drug and a sedative. When asked if the president had been unconscious during the examination, one doctor said no, but such patients are generally in “non-decision-making form for two or three hours after the injection.”
In 1982 it was reported that Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist had, under a doctor’s prescription, been taking a sleeping pill called Placidyl for severe back pains. When doctors cut the dosage he was taking, Rehnquist suffered severe withdrawal symptoms, including some perceptual distortions and hallucinations. Dr. Dennis O’Leary of the George Washington University Medical Center said, however, that Rehnquist had not been addicted to the drug. “Addiction is a buzz word, as you know. It carries a negative connotation.” Rather, Dr. O’Leary said, the drug had “established an interrelationship with the body, such that if the drug is removed precipitously, there is a reaction.”
In the doublespeak of the medical profession, hospitals that are in business to make money are called “proprietary” or “investor owned.” Hospitals and doctors don’t charge for their services, but ask for “reimbursement.” Radiology and orthopedics are called “product lines,” and those services that require physical contact with patients are called “high-touch products.” Patients are called “consumers,” patients who pay with private insurance are called “retail customers,” and getting patients is called “patient accrual.” Any medical treatment that requires cutting, puncturing, or jabbing is called a “procedure” (as in “invasive procedure” for surgery), while treatment requiring talking, thinking, or counseling is called a “cognitive service.” Even general medicine is a specialty now.
The big word in the medical business these days is “wellness,” as in “Patient failed to fulfill his wellness potential,” a notation made by a doctor on the hospital chart of a patient who had died. The University of California, Berkeley Wellness Letter defines wellness as “optimum physical and mental health. A positive, on-going approach to a robust lifestyle. A preventative way of living that reduces—sometimes eliminates—the need for remedies.”
Doublespeak can and is used to avoid those harsh realities the medical profession prefers not to acknowledge. At Creedmore Psychiatric Center in New York, a mental patient in a straitjacket died of “inappropriate physical abuse,” said Irene Platt, acting chair of the New York State Commission on Quality of Care for the Mentally Disabled. Don’t you wonder what might constitute appropriate physical abuse?
Medical doublespeak can have political and moral implications, as well as life-and-death consequences. In his 1987 book, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, Randy Shilts discusses AIDSpeak, “a new language forged by public health officials, anxious gay politicians, and the burgeoning ranks of ‘AIDS activists.’ ” Shilts points out that AIDSpeak was designed to be “politically facile and psychologically reassuring.” AIDSpeak goes to great lengths never to offend the moral or political sensibilities of the public, politicians, and members of the gay community. AIDSpeak never refers to AIDS sufferers as victims. They’re called “People With AIDS,” or “PWAs.” That unpleasant word, “promiscuous,” becomes in AIDSpeak “sexually active,” because gay politicians decided that the word “promiscuous” was “judgmental” and AIDSpeak could never be judgmental. The most used phrase in AIDSpeak is “bodily fluids,” an expression that avoids troublesome words like “semen.”
But the most pernicious word in AIDSpeak, according to Shilts, is the term “exposed.” Persons who had the HTLV-III antibodies were told they had been “exposed” to the virus, and the term soon became beloved by health workers around the country because it avoided so many problems. Yet this word is doublespeak of the most serious kind, because people who have the antibodies to a virus have been infected by it. They haven’t simply been exposed. As Dr. Bruce Voeller, a San Diego research microbiologist, said, “When people say ‘expose,’ I get the feeling that they think the virus floats around the room, like the scent of gardenias, and somehow they get exposed. That’s not how it works. If you’ve got an antibody, that virus has been in your blood.” AIDSpeak is the doublespeak of life and death.
In the doublespeak of medicine, doctors addicted to drugs are “impaired physicians.” At least that’s what the American Medical Association says. The doctor who charged Blue Shield for services that were either medically unnecessary or were never performed had “inappropriately received” $750,000. Others might call it theft. Patients don’t experience pain anymore, just “discomfort.” But then, as noted earlier, people don’t die in hospitals anymore, there’s just “negative patient care outcome,” a “terminal episode,” or “terminal living.” In the emergency room, “systems fail.” And when the surgeon at a Philadelphia hospital perforated the patient’s colon during an examination resulting in complications which caused the patient’s death the hospital attributed death to a “diagnostic misadventure of a high magnitude.” Such is the doublespeak of death in the medical world.
