Ollie North Recompensed for His Vernacular Obfuscation

Does Ollie North deserve this year’s Doublespeak Award? Does an ursine quadruped dispose of solid waste in a sylvan environment?

Lt. Col. Oliver North, and his ex-boss John Poindexter, won the barbed Doublespeak Award from the National Council of Teachers of English for using words such as “residuals” instead of “money” and “non-log” documents instead of “destroyed” during his testimony on the Iran-Contra scandal. The council announced its “ironic tribute” Friday at the group’s national convention at the downtown Hilton.

“This past year has been an unusually good year for doublespeak,” said Rutgers University English professor William D. Lutz, who heads the council’s Doublespeak Committee.

The award, a hybrid from “doublethink” and “newspeak” in George Orwell’s book “1984,” has been skewering public personages who commit euphemistic mayhem since 1974, when another U.S. colonel talking about Cambodia raged at reporters: “You always write it’s bombing, bombing, bombing. It’s not bombing. It’s air support!”

To applause that could only be characterized as sardonic, Lutz noted that North “never called any of his actions lying,” but instead forwarded information that was “radically different from the truth.” In North’s vocabulary, “official lies were ‘plausible deniability,’ ” Lutz added.

“In Poindexter’s world, one can ‘acquiesce’ to a shipment of weapons while at the same time not authorize the shipment,” and the former national security adviser himself protested that it was not fair to say he had misinformed Congress; instead, “ ‘I’ve testified that I withheld information from Congress,’ ” Lutz recounted.

In the past, the group has zapped NASA for labeling the Challenger explosion an “anomaly,” a right-to-die group for calling suicide “self-deliverance” and the Pentagon for referring to the neutron bomb as “a radiation enhancement weapon.”

Although the committee this year honored President Reagan (already a two-time winner) as the second-place finisher for his waffling on what he knew about the Iran-Contra matter, Lutz did not neglect the business world.

The time-honored profession of bill collector has been replaced by the new profession of “portfolio administrator.” There are “executive snack route consultants” (potato chip delivery people), “abduction expenses” (ransom money), and from Congress, “splash and spray suppression devices” (mud flaps). Even Lutz’s own car repairman back in New Jersey characterizes himself as “an automotive internist.”

The military, CIA and State Department jointly captured third place for “low-intensity conflict,” which the Navy summarizes as “violent peace.” In the U.S. Army, killing has become “servicing the target.”

Not all is gobbledygook gloom, though. The committee also presented the George Orwell Award for contributions to honesty and clarity in public language to linguist Noam Chomsky, who now shares the honor with such past winners as television newsman Ted Koppel.

As droll as the committee’s collection is--and hundreds of correspondents send them thousands of gaffes each year--Lutz sees a sinister side to such language.

“This is done so you don’t know what they’re talking about; that’s what they want,” Lutz said he believes. “If our political language, our economic language, becomes reduced to doublespeak, how can we have an informed electorate that makes intelligent choices? It’s ultimately a subversion of democracy.”

But Americans are not the only offenders.

An Australian company does not manufacture plows; it makes “earth engaging equipment.” Canadian car washers are “vehicle appearance specialists.” And the Soviet Union, which officially has no prostitutes, employs poetry if not honesty: Soviet prostitutes are “ladies of easy virtue.”

No trophies are sent to the presumably chastened winners whose language is “grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing or self-contradictory.”

“I’ve always wanted to give them a nice little plaque, but I always get voted down,” Lutz said.

As long as he is wishing, Lutz said he’d like to return the Defense Department to its old--and, he says, more honest--moniker: the War Department.

Otherwise, he said mockingly, you could one day settle down with a good book: that great Russian novel, “Defense and Peace.”