If there was ever a more deceitful and disgusting use of language to communicate with others, it has to be doublespeak. According to William Lutz in his essay “The World of Doublespeak“, doublespeak is “a blanket term for language which pretends to communicate but doesn’t, language which makes the bad seem good, the negative appear positive, the unpleasant attractive, or at least tolerable.” The sole intention of doublespeak is to “mislead, distort, deceive, inflate, circumvent [and] obfuscate.” In this analysis and review of Lutz’s essay, we will be taking a look at examples of doublespeak and extrapolating the true meaning behind those words. Firstly, here is a video of Lutz during an interview about why people do not trust politicians and why they are not voting.
From reading Lutz’s essay and watching this interview, it is very clear that the main source of doublespeak usage in the world comes from the political sector.
Whether it comes from senators, lawyers, government-funded organizations or even the President himself, the purpose of this doublespeak is to help them either cover their behinds when they screw up and get backlash for it or to cleverly veil the true intentions of the user from the audience until it is too late to realize what they were up to.
While it is a dishonest and revolting practice, there are a few applications of doublespeak that are actually helpful for people’s well beings and help tend to the fragile human psyche. Take a look at the phrase “gone to a better place” for example. This is a phrase most commonly used in association with someone’s death, a subject that a lot of people can’t normally handle that well. Letting a person know that someone has died using this phrase or other phrases like “passed away” or “no longer with us” help ease them into the subject and be able to come to terms with the death at a leisurely pace that won’t potentially have negative impacts on them in the immediate future. Using words in this manner is defined by Lutz as a “euphemism.” Only once a euphemism is used to “mislead or deceive, however, [does it become] doublespeak.”
Another form of doublespeak discussed in the essay is inflated language, where you use a complex forming of phrases to speak about a simple subject or object. An example is like saying “locale for the criminally unstable” when you could just as easily say insane asylum, or describing somebody as being of a “diminished stature” when you mean to call them short. Inflated language is normally used to make someone seem more intelligent than they actually are or to make something seem like more than it actually is. This can also apply when talking about a job position: such examples include “canine relocation specialist” for dog catcher or “sandwich artists” for someone who works at a deli or sandwich shop.
Lutz spoke of jargon, “the specialized language of a trade or profession,” as a separate form of doublespeak, but in my opinion it is a more specialized version of inflated language. While it is normally only spoken by those in specialized fields that use terms that the layman wouldn’t be privy to, jargon can still technically be simplified down to words that anyone could understand. The only reason for jargon is to confuse the public and give a level of exclusivity to the profession that keeps others from knowing what goes on in that field.
The last form of doublespeak that Lutz mentions is gobbledygook, which is doublespeak that does not make sense. Like the word itself, gobbledygook is confusing and distracts from actual rhetoric. Let’s take a look at an example I grabbed from a Nipissing University article: “Exclusive dedication to necessitous chores without interlude of hedonist diversion renders John an unresponsive fellow.” This odd sentence is a gobbledygook perversion of the classic saying, “All work and no play makes John a dull boy.”
Doublespeak is a messy language form that seems to normally cater to the benefit of corrupt individuals. It can have some positive uses but those are far and few between the muck you have to wade through to find them. Let’s ponder over some of the following questions:
- What are your experiences with doublespeak? Were they positive or negative?
- This essay was written in the 90s. Would you say that doublespeak is still just as prevalent in the present day?
- Is mastering doublespeak a part of becoming an excellent rhetorician?