Airline 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
