Doublespeak. William Lutz

“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