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
