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The New Doublespeak: Why No One Knows What Anyone's Saying Anymore

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This text clearly defines how "doublespeak" is used in mass media and it should be a required text book for all communication and journalism majors. You will never watch the evening news again without listening for the doublespeak, nor will you be able to read a newspaper without noticicing how much is written while so little is said. I, too, checked this book out of the library and now I'm buying a copy for my reference library.

William Lutz's book should be required reading in every class that is used to meet the college undergraduate critical thinking requirement. He formalizes a means of detecting and dealing with "double-speak;" and double-speak, unfortunately, is a part of eveyday life in this country. An excellent book, after reading a copy from the college library, I am buying a copy for my home library.

Mr. Lutz's book is brimming with references and an extensive bibliography. His research, notably the psychology, is thorough, and he expresses his ideas in the unadorned English he advocates. Orwell and Huxley would be proud! He could trim some chapters, however. In citing example after example of doublespeak, he tends to belabor the point; fewer examples and more references would suffice for those who wish to seek additional examples. His discussion centers around politics, where doublespeak abounds. His political examples, while proving his point, come almost exclusively from the Reagan and Bush administrations. It is not until the last third of the book that he mentions any of the Clinton administration's, or the Democratic National Committee's doublespeak, which we have been bombarded with over the past six years. If you can overlook Lutz's politically liberal bias, which becomes evident often, this book is a must-read, especially the chapter on how to fight doublespeak.

In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord delved into the myriad of ways that modern society has been spectacularized through the mind-numbing assault by PR firms, advertisers and the media, in reiterating a culture where capitalism is presented as the only possible means of human existence. The spectacle that results from a culture where 24 hour coverage of even the most insignificant of events, such as, Madonna's wedding, Lady Di's death, or the OJ trial--all interspersed with an endless onslaught of Nike ads, sitcom drivel--works explicitly to confuse and sedate the public (consumers)--insulating them from the unpleasant realities of war, famine and environmental destruction. Thus, the image becomes the preferred tool of domination and the medium of modern propaganda.

In the same way, William Lutz seeks to expose the ways in which language is manipulated and transformed from units of meaning into a complex code of evasion and linguistic subterfuge. Contrary to what some say language and its meaning is never dependent upon neutrality, it is, instead, always the subjective, creation of the speaker/author. De Saussure pointed out that language is indeed an arbitrary creation, the meaning of which is dependent on little more than the whims of its speakers. As Lutz points out it is precisely in the realm of meaning that understanding the jargon of doublespeak becomes vital.

For example, the word "downsizing" is employed day in day out on the news to express what would be more appropriately described as the firing or laying off of employees. Or, to employ current doublespeak we could choose to call this same act: eliminating redundancies in the human resources area or destaffing., Then again, we could also say that the employees were derecruited, deselected, dis-employed, outplaced, non-retained or idled indefinitely. The point of this little exercise is to illustrate the often complex ways that language is becoming increasingly jargon-laden and obscured for the express purpose of concealing and obfuscating its meaning, and thus, managing our reactions to it, be that from our government, corporations, health care providers or media outlets.

In Orwell's 1984 the vital role of language in a free society is explicitly investigated and as history as shown the manipulation of language and meaning is a basic tool of modern war. Whether called propaganda or the manufacture of consent, the effect of the resulting manipulation of public sentiment is primarily the same. Perhaps, as a result of these views you may consider William Lutz a bit hypervigilant, in need of enrollment to a labor reform camp for ideological re-education. On the Contrary, when, as Lutz illustrates, words no longer are used to express meaning, but are used merely as devices to conceal and obscure meaning we must question the underlying reasons for this practice.

For example, consider the difference between a "freedom fighter" and a "terrorist". What is the difference? It seems that the only difference tends to lie on whether or not those in question are fighting as allies or enemies to national security interests of the US. A fine illustration of the publics basic inability to discern the seriousness of this problem is expresses by the public outcry over Timothy McVeigh's comments concerning the killing of children, which he referred to as "collateral damage." The point being that McVeigh was simply using the military terminology (doublespeak) for the killing of civilian non-combatants, something that causes not even a blink when used to describe the bombing of civilian populations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Serbia, Viet Nam, etc. It is precisely, this type of selective condemnation that Lutz wants to bring to public attention and unless the killing of civilians is condemned on universal grounds, people will always find ways to justify its use as a military asset, with words as their preferred weapon of evasion.

Lutz's point in this book is that politicians, lawyers, economists etc. use language deceptively in public discourse by redefining terms, coming up with "meaningless" terms to replace others that are deemed less palatable, or even lying. In the modern political and business climate, the thesis is one with which most of us would or should agree. After seven years of the Mighty Clinton Spin Machine ("draconian cuts", "risky tax scheme", "I did not have sexual relations with that woman..."), the power of deceptive language is obvious and frightening. However, despite the fact that most conservative readers will share Lutz's distaste for spin (as Rush Limbaugh says, "Words mean things."), they will find themselves, as I did, strangely distanced from the discussion. That's because Lutz's political leanings are so clearly liberal and so clearly evident in the text. Aside from about 3 pages dealing with Clinton-Gore and two brief discussions of college speech codes, almost every example he cites is from Reagan, Bush, Haig, big business, etc. He deals with Bush's "No new taxes" pledge, but ignores Clinton's similar promise not to "raise taxes on the middle class". He discusses how big businesses fighting environmental programs often choose innocuous or environmentally-friendly sounding names to "disguise" their true intentions without mentioning the irony of the fact that groups like "Greenpeace" often use methods that are often far from peaceful. The book is filled with such imbalanced discussions.This is not only frustrating and off-putting, it borders on hypocritical. On the surface Lutz seems to be claiming (rightfully) that people in public life should stop trying to redefine or come up with new terms that mislead or obfuscate. They should use words with the meanings that are commonly accepted by society at large. However, as the political bias in his examples demonstrates, Lutz believes that society at large is primarily made up of people who share the liberals' definition of terms. In other words, it's doublespeak when conservatives use terms that don't agree with the liberal worldview, but when Lutz throws around terms like sludge, fired, or slaughter, or when he takes words out of context (such as his comments about a William Safire passage), or when he treats as irrelevant the meaningful distinction between good faith and bad faith warrantless searches these are considered examples of the responsible use of language.His ideas are too interesting and too important to civil and truthful discourse in our society to be presented in such a one-sided and politically charged fashion.