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
