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
