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ОглавлениеThere are no potholes in the streets of Tucson, Arizona, just “pavement deficiencies.” The Reagan Administration didn’t propose any new taxes, just “revenue enhancement” through new “user’s fees.” Those aren’t bums on the street, just “non-goal oriented members of society.” There are no more poor people, just “fiscal underachievers.” There was no robbery of an automatic teller machine, just an “unauthorized withdrawal.” The patient didn’t die because of medical malpractice, it was just a “diagnostic misadventure of a high magnitude.” The U.S. Army doesn’t kill the enemy anymore, it just “services the target.” And the doublespeak goes on.
Doublespeak is language that pretends to communicate but really doesn’t. It is language that makes the bad seem good, the negative appear positive, the unpleasant appear attractive or at least tolerable. Doublespeak is language that avoids or shifts responsibility, language that is at variance with its real or purported meaning. It is language that conceals or prevents thought; rather than extending thought, doublespeak limits it.
Doublespeak is not a matter of subjects and verbs agreeing; it is a matter of words and facts agreeing. Basic to doublespeak is incongruity, the incongruity between what is said or left unsaid, and what really is. It is the incongruity between the word and the referent, between seem and be, between the essential function of language—communication—and what doublespeak does—mislead, distort, deceive, inflate, circumvent, obfuscate.
How to Spot Doublespeak
How can you spot doublespeak? Most of the time you will recognize doublespeak when you see or hear it. But, if you have any doubts, you can identify doublespeak just by answering these questions: Who is saying what to whom, under what conditions and circumstances, with what intent, and with what results? Answering these questions will usually help you identify as doublespeak language that appears to be legitimate or that at first glance doesn’t even appear to be doublespeak.
First Kind of Doublespeak
There are at least four kinds of doublespeak. The first is the euphemism, an inoffensive or positive word or phrase used to avoid a harsh, unpleasant, or distasteful reality. But a euphemism can also be a tactful word or phrase which avoids directly mentioning a painful reality, or it can be an expression used out of concern for the feelings of someone else, or to avoid directly discussing a topic subject to a social or cultural taboo.
When you use a euphemism because of your sensitivity for someone’s feelings or out of concern for a recognized social or cultural taboo, it is not doublespeak. For example, you express your condolences that someone has “passed away” because you do not want to say to a grieving person, “I’m sorry your father is dead.” When you use the euphemism “passed away,” no one is misled. Moreover, the euphemism functions here not just to protect the feelings of another person, but to communicate also your concern for that person’s feelings during a period of mourning. When you excuse yourself to go to the “rest room,” or you mention that someone is “sleeping with” or “involved with” someone else, you do not mislead anyone about your meaning, but you do respect the social taboos about discussing bodily functions and sex in direct terms. You also indicate your sensitivity to the feelings of your audience, which is usually considered a mark of courtesy and good manners.
However, when a euphemism is used to mislead or deceive, it becomes doublespeak. For example, in 1984 the U.S. State Department announced that it would no longer use the word “killing” in its annual report on the status of human rights in countries around the world. Instead, it would use the phrase “unlawful or arbitrary deprivation of life,” which the department claimed was more accurate. Its real purpose for using this phrase was simply to avoid discussing the embarrassing situation of government-sanctioned killings in countries that are supported by the United States and have been certified by the United States as respecting the human rights of their citizens. This use of a euphemism constitutes doublespeak, since it is designed to mislead, to cover up the unpleasant. Its real intent is at variance with its apparent intent. It is language designed to alter our perception of reality.
The Pentagon, too, avoids discussing unpleasant realities when it refers to bombs and artillery shells that fall on civilian targets as “incontinent ordnance.” And in 1977 the Pentagon tried to slip funding for the neutron bomb unnoticed into an appropriations bill by calling it a “radiation enhancement device.”
Second Kind of Doublespeak
A second kind of doublespeak is jargon, the specialized language of a trade, profession, or similar group, such as that used by doctors, lawyers, engineers, educators, or car mechanics. Jargon can serve an important and useful function. Within a group, jargon functions as a kind of verbal shorthand that allows members of the group to communicate with each other clearly, efficiently, and quickly. Indeed, it is a mark of membership in the group to be able to use and understand the group’s jargon.
But jargon, like the euphemism, can also be doublespeak. It can be—and often is—pretentious, obscure, and esoteric terminology used to give an air of profundity, authority, and prestige to speakers and their subject matter. Jargon as doublespeak often makes the simple appear complex, the ordinary profound, the obvious insightful. In this sense it is used not to express but impress. With such doublespeak, the act of smelling something becomes “organoleptic analysis,” glass becomes “fused silicate,” a crack in a metal support beam becomes a “discontinuity,” conservative economic policies become “distributionally conservative notions.”
Lawyers, for example, speak of an “involuntary conversion” of property when discussing the loss or destruction of property through theft, accident, or condemnation. If your house burns down or if your car is stolen, you have suffered an involuntary conversion of your property. When used by lawyers in a legal situation, such jargon is a legitimate use of language, since lawyers can be expected to understand the term.
However, when a member of a specialized group uses its jargon to communicate with a person outside the group, and uses it knowing that the nonmember does not understand such language, then there is doublespeak. For example, on May 9, 1978, a National Airlines 727 airplane crashed while attempting to land at the Pensacola, Florida airport. Three of the fifty-two passengers aboard the airplane were killed. As a result of the crash, National made an after-tax insurance benefit of $1.7 million, or an extra 18 cents a share dividend for its stockholders. Now National Airlines had two problems: It did not want to talk about one of its airplanes crashing, and it had to account for the $1.7 million when it issued its annual report to its stockholders. National solved the problem by inserting a footnote in its annual report which explained that the $1.7 million income was due to “the involuntary conversion of a 727.” National thus acknowledged the crash of its airplane and the subsequent profit it made from the crash, without once mentioning the accident or the deaths. However, because airline officials knew that most stock-holders in the company, and indeed most of the general public, were not familiar with legal jargon, the use of such jargon constituted doublespeak.
Third Kind of Doublespeak
A third kind of doublespeak is gobbledygook or bureaucratese. Basically, such doublespeak is simply a matter of piling on words, of overwhelming the audience with words, the bigger the words and the longer the sentences the better. Alan Greenspan, then chair of President Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisors, was quoted in The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1974 as having testified before a Senate committee that “It is a tricky problem to find the particular calibration in timing that would be appropriate to stem the acceleration in risk premiums created by falling incomes without prematurely aborting the decline in the inflation-generated risk premiums.”
Nor has Mr. Greenspan’s language changed since then. Speaking to the meeting of the Economic Club of New York in 1988, Mr. Greenspan, now Federal Reserve chair, said, “I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I’ve said.” Mr. Greenspan’s doublespeak doesn’t seem to have held back his career.
Sometimes gobbledygook may sound impressive, but when the quote is later examined in print it doesn’t even make sense. During the 1988 presidential campaign, vice-presidential candidate Senator Dan Quayle explained the need for a strategic-defense initiative by saying, “Why wouldn’t an enhanced deterrent, a more stable peace, a better prospect to denying the ones who enter conflict in the first place to have a reduction of offensive systems and an introduction to defensive capability? I believe this is the route the country will eventually go.”
The investigation into the Challenger disaster in 1986 revealed the doublespeak of gobbledygook and bureaucratese used by too many involved in the shuttle program. When Jesse Moore, NASA’s associate administrator, was asked if the performance of the shuttle program had improved with each launch or if it had remained the same, he answered, “I think our performance in terms of the liftoff performance and in terms of the orbital performance, we knew more about the envelope we were operating under, and we have been pretty accurately staying in that. And so I would say the performance has not by design drastically improved. I think we have been able to characterize the performance more as a function of our launch experience as opposed to it improving as a function of time.” While this language may appear to be jargon, a close look will reveal that it is really just gobbledygook laced with jargon. But you really have to wonder if Mr. Moore had any idea what he was saying.
Fourth Kind of Doublespeak
The fourth kind of doublespeak is inflated language that is designed to make the ordinary seem extraordinary; to make everyday things seem impressive; to give an air of importance to people, situations, or things that would not normally be considered important; to make the simple seem complex. Often this kind of doublespeak isn’t hard to spot, and it is usually pretty funny. While car mechanics may be called “automotive internists,” elevator operators members of the “vertical transportation corps,” used cars “pre-owned” or “experienced cars,” and black- and-white television sets described as having “non-multicolor capability,” you really aren’t misled all that much by such language.
However, you may have trouble figuring out that, when Chrysler “initiates a career alternative enhancement program,” it is really laying off five thousand workers; or that “negative patient care outcome” means the patient died; or that “rapid oxidation” means a fire in a nuclear power plant.
The doublespeak of inflated language can have serious consequences. In Pentagon doublespeak, “pre-emptive counterattack” means that American forces attacked first; “engaged the enemy on all sides” means American troops were ambushed; “backloading of augmentation personnel” means a retreat by American troops. In the doublespeak of the military, the 1983 invasion of Grenada was conducted not by the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, but by the “Caribbean Peace Keeping Forces.” But then, according to the Pentagon, it wasn’t an invasion, it was a “predawn vertical insertion.”
Doublespeak Throughout History
Doublespeak is not a new use of language peculiar to the politics or economics of the twentieth century. In the fifth century B.C., the Greek historian Thucydides wrote in The Peloponnesian War that
revolution thus ran its course from city to city. . . . Words had to change their ordinary meanings and to take those which were now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent, a man to be suspected.
Julius Caesar, in his account of the Gallic Wars, described his brutal and bloody conquest and subjugation of Gaul as “pacifying” Gaul. “Where they make a desert, they call it peace,” said an English nobleman quoted by the Roman historian Tacitus. When traitors were put to death in Rome, the announcement of their execution was made in the form of saying “they have lived.” ‘Taking notice of a man in the ancestral manner” meant capital punishment; “the prisoner was then lead away” meant he was executed.
In his memoirs, V-2, Walter Dornberger, commanding officer of the Peenemunde Rocket Research Institute in Germany during World War II, describes how he and his staff used language to get what they needed from the Bureau of Budget for their rocket experiments. A pencil sharpener was an “Appliance for milling wooden dowels up to 10 millimeters in diameter,” and a typewriter was an “Instrument for recording test data with rotating roller.” But it was the Nazis who were the masters of doublespeak, and they used it not just to achieve and maintain power but to perpetrate some of the most heinous crimes in the history of the human race.
In the world of Nazi Germany, nonprofessional prostitutes were called “persons with varied sexual relationships”; “protective custody” was the very opposite of protective; “Winter Relief’ was a compulsory tax presented as a voluntary charity; and a “straightening of the front” was a retreat, while serious difficulties became “bottlenecks.” Minister of Information (the very title is doublespeak) Josef Goebbels spoke in all seriousness of “simple pomp” and “the liberalization of the freedom of the press.”
Nazi doublespeak reached its peak when dealing with the “Final Solution,” a phrase that is itself the ultimate in doublespeak. The notice, “The Jew X.Y. lived here,” posted on a door, meant the occupant had been “deported,” that is, killed. When mail was returned stamped “Addressee has moved away,” it meant the person had been “deported.” “Resettlement” also meant deportation, while “work camp” meant concentration camp or incinerator, “action” meant massacre, “Special Action Groups” were army units that conducted mass murder, “selection” meant gassing, and “shot while trying to escape” meant deliberately killed in a concentration camp.
George Orwell and Language
In his famous and now-classic essay, “Politics and the English Language,” which was published in 1946, George Orwell wrote that the “great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” For Orwell, language was an instrument for “expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.” In his most biting comment, he observed that, “in our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible [P]olitical language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. . . . Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Orwell understood well the power of language as both a tool and a weapon. In the nightmare world of his novel, 1984, Orwell depicted a society where language was one of the most important tools of the totalitarian state. Newspeak, the official state language in the world of 1984, was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of human thought, to make only “correct” thought possible and all other modes of thought impossible. It was, in short, a language designed to create a reality that the state wanted.
Newspeak had another important function in Orwell’s world of 1984. It provided the means of expression for doublethink, the mental process that allows you to hold two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time and believe in both of them. The classic example in Orwell’s novel is the slogan, “War Is Peace.” Lest you think doublethink is confined only to Orwell’s novel, you need only recall the words of Secretary of State Alexander Haig when he testified before a congressional committee in 1982 that a continued weapons build-up by the United States is “absolutely essential to our hopes for meaningful arms reduction.” Or remember what Senator Orin Hatch said in 1988: “Capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.”
At its worst, doublespeak, like newspeak, is language designed to limit, if not eliminate, thought. Like doublethink, doublespeak enables speaker and listener, writer and reader, to hold two opposing ideas in their minds at the same time and believe in both of them. At its least offensive, doublespeak is inflated language that tries to give importance to the insignificant.
The Doublespeak All Around Us
Orwell was concerned primarily with political language because it is the language of power, but it is not just political language that is so misleading these days. Everywhere you turn you encounter the language with which Orwell was so concerned. It’s not an economic recession but, according to the Reagan Administration, a “period of accelerated negative growth” or simply “negative economic growth.” There’s no such thing as acid rain; according to the Environmental Protection Agency, it’s just “poorly buffered precipitation” or, more impressively, “atmospheric deposition of anthropogenetically-derived acidic substances.” And those aren’t gangsters, mobsters, the Mafia, or La Cosa Nostra in Atlantic City; according to the “New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement” (a doublespeak title that avoids the use of that dreaded word, “gambling”) they’re just “members of a career-offender cartel.”
Military Doublespeak
Military doublespeak seems to have always been around. In 1947 the name of the Department of War was changed to the more pleasing if misleading Department of Defense. How much easier it is to spend hundreds of billions of dollars for defense instead of war. During the Vietnam War the American public learned that it was an “incursion” into Cambodia, not an invasion; a “protective reaction strike” or “a limited duration protective reaction strike” or “air support,” not bombing.
When asked why U.S. forces lacked intelligence information on Grenada before they invaded the island in 1983, Admiral Wesley L. McDonald told reporters that “We were not micromanaging Grenada intelligence-wise until about that time frame.” In today’s armed forces it’s not a shovel but a “combat emplacement evacuator,” not a bullet hole but a “ballistically induced aperture in the subcutaneous environment.”
Business Doublespeak
The world of business has produced large amounts of doublespeak. If an airplane crash is one of the worst things that can happen to an airline company, a recall of automobiles because of a safety defect is one of the worst things that can happen to an automobile company. In April of 1972, when the Ford Motor Company had to recall 423,000 1972 Torino and Mercury Montego models to correct “mechanical deficiencies,” the company sent a letter to all those who had bought the defective cars. In its letter, Ford said that the rear axle bearings of the cars “can deteriorate” and went on to say “Continued driving with a failed bearing could result in disengagement of the axle shaft and adversely affect vehicle control.” This is the language of nonresponsibility. What are “mechanical deficiencies”—poor design, bad workmanship? The rear axle bearings “can deteriorate,” but will they deteriorate? If they do deteriorate, what causes the deterioration? Note that “continued driving” is the subject of the sentence, which suggests that it is not Ford’s poor manufacturing that is at fault but the driver who insists on driving the defective car. Note, too, the expression “failed bearing,” which implies that the bearing failed, not Ford. Finally, the phrase “adversely affect vehicle control” means simply that, because of the mechanical defect, the driver could lose control of the car and get killed.
If you ask the questions for examining language to see if it’s doublespeak (who is saying what to whom, under what conditions and circumstances, with what intent, and with what results), you can quickly discover the doublespeak here. What Ford should be saying to its customers is that the car Ford sold them has a serious defect that should be corrected immediately, otherwise the customer runs the risk of being seriously injured or killed. But you have to find this message beneath the doublespeak that Ford has used to disguise its embarrassing and unpleasant message. We will never know how many customers didn’t bring their cars in for repairs because they didn’t understand from that letter just how serious the problem was and that they’d better get their car to the service department fast.
When it comes time to fire or lay off employees, business has produced more than enough doublespeak to deal with the unpleasant situation. Employees are, of course, never fired or laid off. They are “selected out,” “placed out,” “non-retained,” “released,” “dehired,” or “non-renewed.” A corporation will “eliminate the redundancies in the human resources area,” assign “candidates for derecruitment” to a “mobility pool,” “revitalize the department” by placing executives on “special assignment,” “enhance the efficiency of operations,” “streamline the field sales organization,” or “further rationalize marketing efforts.” The reality behind all this doublespeak is that companies are firing or laying off employees, but no one wants to acknowledge to the stockholders, public, or competition that times are tough, business is bad, and people have to go.
When the oil industry was hit hard by declining sales and a surplus of oil, after years of great prosperity and a shortage of oil, the doublespeak flowed thicker than crude oil. Because of “reduced demand for product,” which results in “space refining capacity” and problems in “down-stream operations,” oil companies have been forced to “re-evaluate and consolidate their operations” and take “appropriate cost-reduction actions,” in order to “enhance the efficiency of operations,” which has meant the “elimination of marginal outlets,” “accelerating our divestment program,” and the “disposition of low throughput marketing units.” This doublespeak really means that oil companies have fired employees, cut back on expenses, and closed gas stations and oil refineries because there’s a surplus of oil and people are not buying as much gas and oil as in the past.
One oil company faced with declining business sent a memorandum to its employees advising them that the company’s “business plans are under revision and now reflect a more moderate approach toward our operating and capital programs.” The result of this “more moderate approach” is a “surplus of professional/technical employees.” To “assist in alleviating the surplus, selected professional and technical employees” have been “selected to participate” in a “Voluntary Program” providing “incentives” for employees who “resign voluntarily.” What this memorandum means, of course, is that expenses must be cut because of declining business, so some employees will have to go.
Wall Street produces doublespeak right along with the junk bonds. It is rare to read in a trade publication that the stock market “fell.” Others might say the stock market fell, but those who work on Wall Street prefer to say that the stock market “retreated,” “eased,” made a “technical adjustment” or a “technical correction,” or perhaps that “prices were off due to profit taking,” or “off in light trading,” or “lost ground.” In October 1987, when the stock market collapsed, losing billions of dollars, one brokerage house called the collapse a “fourth quarter equity retreat.” As a side note, it is interesting to observe that the stock market never rises because of a “technical adjustment” or “correction,” nor does it ever “ease” upward. Stock prices always “climb,” “advance,” “move forward,” “edge up,” or “surge.”
Business magazines, corporate reports, executive speeches, and the business sections of newspapers are filled with words and phrases such as “marginal rates of substitution,” “equilibrium price,” “getting off margin,” “distributional coalition,” “non-performing assets,” and “encompassing organizations.” Much of this is jargon or inflated language designed to make the simple seem complex, but there are other examples of business doublespeak that misleads or is designed to avoid a harsh reality. What should you make of such expressions as “negative deficit” or “revenue excesses” (i.e., profit), “invest in” (spend money or buy something), “price enhancement” or “price adjustment” (price increase), “shortfall” (mistake in planning), or “period of accelerated negative growth” or “negative economic growth” (recession)?
Business doublespeak often attempts to give substance to pure wind (to use Orwell’s term), to make ordinary actions seem complex. Executives “operate” in “timeframes” within the “context” of which a “task force” will serve as the proper “conduit” for all the necessary “input” to “program a scenario” that, within acceptable “parameters,” and with the proper “throughput,” will “generate” the “maximum output” for a “print out” of “zero defect terminal objectives” which will “enhance the bottom line.”
Education Doublespeak
Politicians, members of the military, and businesspeople are not the only ones who use doublespeak. People in all parts of society use it. Education has more than its share of doublespeak. On some college campuses, what was once the Department of Physical Education is now the “Department of Human Kinetics” or the “College of Applied Life Studies.” You may have called it Home Economics, but now it’s the “School of Human Resources and Family Studies.” These days, you don’t go to the library to study; you go to the “Learning Resources Center.”
Those aren’t desks in the elementary school classroom, they’re “pupil stations.” Teachers, who are “classroom managers” applying an “action plan” to a “knowledge base,” are concerned with the “basic fundamentals,” which are “inexorably linked” to the “education user’s” “time-on-task.” Students don’t take simple tests; now it’s “criterion-referenced testing” that measures whether a student has achieved the “operational curricular objectives.” A school system in Pennsylvania, making absolutely no mention of whether the student learned anything, uses the following grading system on its report cards: “no effort, less than minimal effort, minimal effort, more than minimal effort, less than full effort, full effort, better than full effort, effort increasing, effort decreasing.”
B. W. Harlston, president of City College in New York, said in 1982 that some college students in New York come from “economically nonaffluent” families, while a spokesperson at Duke University said in 1982 that coach Red Wilson wasn’t being fired, “He just won’t be asked to continue in that job.” An article in a scholarly journal suggests teaching students three approaches to writing to help them become better writers: “concretization of goals, procedural facilitation, and modeling planning.”
In its August 3, 1981 issue, Newsweek magazine reported that the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research published a working paper by Brown University economist Herschel I. Grossman entitled “Familial Love and Intertemporal Optimality.” Professor Grossman reached this conclusion about family love: “An altruistic utility function promotes intertemporal efficiency. However, altruism creates an externality that implies that satisfying the conditions for efficiency does not insure intertemporal optimality.”
A research report issued by the U.S. Office of Education in 1966 contains this sentence: “In other words, feediness is the shared information between toputness, where toputness is at a time just prior to the inputness.” At times, doublespeak seems to be the primary product of educators.
Deadly Doublespeak
There are instances, however, where doublespeak becomes more than amusing, more than a cause for a laugh. At St. Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis in 1982, an anesthetist turned the wrong knob during a Cesarean delivery, giving a fatal dose of nitrous oxide which killed the mother and unborn child. The hospital called it a “therapeutic misadventure.” In its budget request to Congress in 1977, the Pentagon called the neutron bomb “an efficient nuclear weapon that eliminates an enemy with a minimum degree of damage to friendly territory.” The Pentagon also calls the expected tens of millions of civilian dead in a nuclear war “collateral damage,” a term the Pentagon also applies to the civilians killed in any war. And in 1977 people watching the Dick Cavett show on television learned from former Green Beret Captain Bob Marasco that during the Vietnam war the Central Intelligence Agency created the phrase “eliminate with extreme prejudice” to replace the more direct verb “kill.”
President Reagan and the Doublespeak of Politics
Identifying doublespeak can at times be difficult. For example, on July 27, 1981, President Ronald Reagan said in a speech televised to the American public that “I will not stand by and see those of you who are dependent on Social Security deprived of the benefits you’ve worked so hard to earn. You will continue to receive your checks in the full amount due you.” This speech had been billed as President Reagan’s position on Social Security, a subject of much debate at the time. After the speech, public opinion polls revealed that the great majority of the public believed that the president had affirmed his support for Social Security and that he would not support cuts in benefits. However, only days after the speech, on July 31, 1981, an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer quoted White House spokesperson David Gergen as saying that President Reagan’s words had been “carefully chosen.” What President Reagan had meant, according to Gergen, was that he was reserving the right to decide who was “dependent” on those benefits, who had “earned” them, and who, therefore, was “due” them.
The subsequent remarks of David Gergen reveal the real intent of President Reagan as opposed to his apparent intent. Thus, the criteria for analyzing language to determine whether it is doublespeak (who is saying what to whom, under what conditions and circumstances, with what intent, and with what results), when applied in light of David Gergen’s remarks, reveal the doublespeak of President Reagan. Here, indeed, is the insincerity of which Orwell wrote. Here, too, is the gap between the speaker’s real and declared aim.
Doublespeak and Political Advertisements
During the 1982 congressional election campaign, the Republican National Committee sponsored a television advertisement that pictured an elderly, folksy postman delivering Social Security checks “with the 7.4% cost-of-living raise that President Reagan promised.” The postman then adds that “he promised that raise and he kept his promise, in spite of those sticks-in-the-mud who tried to keep him from doing what we elected him to do.” The commercial was, in fact, deliberately misleading. The cost- of-living increases had been provided automatically by law since 1975, and President Reagan had tried three times to roll them back or delay them but was overruled by congressional opposition. When these discrepancies were pointed out to an official of the Republican National Committee, he called the commercial “inoffensive” and added, “Since when is a commercial supposed to be accurate? Do women really smile when they clean their ovens?”
Again, applying the criteria for identifying doublespeak to this advertisement reveals the doublespeak in it, once you know the facts of past actions by President Reagan. Moreover, the official for the Republican National Committee assumes that all advertisements, whether for political candidates or commercial products, do not tell the truth; in his doublespeak, they do not have to be “accurate.” Thus, the real intent of the advertisement was to mislead, while the apparent purpose of the commercial was to inform the public of President Reagan’s position on possible cuts in Social Security benefits. Again there is insincerity, and again there is a gap between the speaker’s real and declared aims.
Alexander Haig and Doublespeak
One of the most chilling and terrifying uses of doublespeak in recent memory occurred in 1981 when then Secretary of State Alexander Haig was testifying before congressional committees about the murder of three American nuns and a Catholic lay worker in El Salvador. The four women had been raped and then shot at close range, and there was clear evidence that the crime had been committed by soldiers of the Salvadoran government. Before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Secretary Haig said:
I’d like to suggest to you that some of the investigations would lead one to believe that perhaps the vehicle the nuns were riding in may have tried to run a roadblock, or may accidentally have been perceived to have been doing so, and there’d been an exchange of fire and then perhaps those who inflicted the casualties sought to cover it up. And this could have been at a very low level of both competence and motivation in the context of the issue itself. But the facts on this are not clear enough for anyone to draw a definitive conclusion.
The next day, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary Haig claimed that press reports on his previous testimony were “inaccurate.” When Senator Claiborne Pell asked whether the secretary was suggesting the possibility that “the nuns may have run through a roadblock,” he replied, “You mean that they tried to violate. . . ? Not at all, no, not at all. My heavens! The dear nuns who raised me in my parochial schooling would forever isolate me from their affections and respect.” Then Senator Pell asked Secretary Haig, “Did you mean that the nuns were firing at the people, or what did ‘an exchange of fire’ mean?” The secretary replied, “I haven’t met any pistol-packing nuns in my day, Senator. What I meant was that if one fellow starts shooting, then the next thing you know they all panic.” Thus did the secretary of state of the United States explain official government policy on the murder of four American citizens in a foreign land.
Secretary Haig’s testimony implies that the women were in some way responsible for their own fate. By using such vague wording as “would lead one to believe” and “may accidentally have been perceived to have been doing so,” he avoids any direct assertion. The use of the phrase “inflicted the casualties” not only avoids using the word “kill” but also implies that at the worst the killings were accidental or justifiable. The result of this testimony is that the secretary of state has become an apologist for rape and murder. This is indeed language.in defense of the indefensible; language designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable; language designed to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
The Dangers of Doublespeak
These previous three examples of doublespeak should make it clear that doublespeak is not the product of carelessness or sloppy thinking. Indeed, most doublespeak is the product of clear thinking and is carefully designed and constructed to appear to communicate when in fact it doesn’t. It is language designed not to lead but mislead. It is language designed to distort reality and corrupt thought. In the world created by doublespeak, if it’s not a tax increase, but rather “revenue enhancement” or “tax base broadening,” how can you complain about higher taxes? If it’s not acid rain, but rather “poorly buffered precipitation,” how can you worry about all those dead trees? If that isn’t the Mafia in Atlantic City, but just “members of a career-offender cartel,” why worry about the influence of organized crime in the city? If Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist wasn’t addicted to the pain-killing drug his doctor prescribed, but instead it was just that the drug had “established an interrelationship with the body, such that if the drug is removed precipitously, there is a reaction,” you needn’t question that his decisions might have been influenced by his drug addiction. If it’s not a Titan II nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile with a warhead 630 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, but instead, according to Air Force Colonel Frank Horton, it’s just a “very large, potentially disruptive reentry system,” why be concerned about the threat of nuclear destruction? Why worry about the neutron bomb escalating the arms race if it’s just a “radiation enhancement weapon”? If it’s not an invasion, but a “rescue mission” or a “predawn vertical insertion,” you won’t need to think about any violations of U.S. or international law.
Doublespeak has become so common in everyday living that many people fail to notice it. Even worse, when they do notice doublespeak being used on them, they don’t react, they don’t protest. Do you protest when you are asked to check your packages at the desk “for your convenience,” when it’s not for your convenience at all but for someone else’s? You see advertisements for “genuine imitation leather,” “virgin vinyl,” or “real counterfeit diamonds,” but do you question the language or the supposed quality of the product? Do you question politicians who don’t speak of slums or ghettos but of the “inner city” or “substandard housing” where the “disadvantaged” live and thus avoid talking about the poor who have to live in filthy, poorly heated, ramshackle apartments or houses? Aren’t you amazed that patients don’t die in the hospital anymore, it’s just “negative patient-care outcome”?
Doublespeak such as that noted earlier that defines cab drivers as “urban transportation specialists,” elevator operators as members of the “vertical transportation corps,” and automobile mechanics as “automotive internists” can be considered humorous and relatively harmless. However, when a fire in a nuclear reactor building is called “rapid oxidation,” an explosion in a nuclear power plant is called an “energetic disassembly,” the illegal overthrow of a legitimate government is termed “destabilizing a government,” and lies are seen as “inoperative statements,” we are hearing doublespeak that attempts to avoid responsibility and make the bad seem good, the negative appear positive, something unpleasant appear attractive; and which seems to communicate but doesn’t. It is language designed to alter our perception of reality and corrupt our thinking. Such language does not provide us with the tools we need to develop, advance, and preserve our culture and our civilization. Such language breeds suspicion, cynicism, distrust, and, ultimately, hostility.
Doublespeak is insidious because it can infect and eventually destroy the function of language, which is communication between people and social groups. This corruption of the function of language can have serious and far-reaching consequences. We live in a country that depends upon an informed electorate to make decisions in selecting candidates for office and deciding issues of public policy. The use of doublespeak can become so pervasive that it becomes the coin of the political realm, with speakers and listeners convinced that they really understand such language. After awhile we may really believe that politicians don’t lie but only “misspeak,” that illegal acts are merely “inappropriate actions,” that fraud and criminal conspiracy are just “miscertification.” President Jimmy Carter in April of 1980 could call the aborted raid to free the American hostages in Teheran an “incomplete success” and really believe that he had made a statement that clearly communicated with the American public. So, too, could President Ronald Reagan say in 1985 that “ultimately our security and our hopes for success at the arms reduction talks hinge on the determination that we show here to continue our program to rebuild and refortify our defenses” and really believe that greatly increasing the amount of money spent building new weapons would lead to a reduction in the number of weapons in the world. If we really believe that we understand such language and that such language communicates and promotes clear thought, then the world of 1984, with its control of reality through language, is upon us.
