DOUBLESPEAK

It may be just a hair's breadth away from the innocuous euphemism, but doublespeak, by its very definition, is language that is created to be evasive and just ambiguous enough that it may intentionally lead to confusion or, at its worst, deception. It is this area of a deliberate attempt to deceive or even simply confuse where the invention of new words or phrases crosses the line from the merely annoying to the downright immoral.

As William Lutz, an English professor at Rutgers and author of the book The New Doublespeak: Why no one knows what anyone 's saying anymore , suggests, doublespeak actually only pretends to say something:

Doublespeak comes in many forms, from the popular buzzwords that everyone uses but no one really understands ” ˜ glocalization , ˜competitive dynamics, ˜re-equitizing and ˜empowerment ”to language that tries to hide meaning: ˜re-engineering, ˜synergy, ˜adjustment, ˜restructure and ˜force management program. ^{[ 5]}

It's one thing to use euphemistic language in an honest attempt to avoid insulting someone ( la political correctness ”a separate issue unto itself), and ethically quite another to intentionally attempt to obfuscate by use of terms that have no precisely agreed-upon meaning. Doing so puts the PR practitioner farther and farther into the propaganda swamp.

Indeed, ˜made-up words tell only part of the story of doublespeak. There's a far more insidious and perhaps even more ethically treacherous strategy.

^{[ 5]} Lutz, William [accessed 16 October 2003] Life Under the Chief Doublespeak Officer. http://www.dt.org/html/Doublespeak.html