More From the Folks Who Brought You ‘Friendly Fire’

The Persian Gulf War not only provided the nation with a quick victory, at the cost of tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, it also increased the vocabulary of doublespeak with dozens of euphemisms meant to soften its cruelties.

As The Times reported the other day, the National Council of Teachers of English gave its 1991 Doublespeak Award to the U.S. Department of Defense. So abundant was its glossary of deceptive terms that the department was almost unchallenged.

For example, in defense doublespeak a warplane was a force package , and it did not bomb a target, but visited a site . Buildings were hard targets , civilians were soft targets . On their visits, the force packages, or weapons systems, degraded, neutralized, attrited, suppressed, eliminated, cleansed, sanitized, impacted or took out sites. Killing the enemy was servicing the target .

The council said: “Civilians killed or wounded and any ‘non-military” targets that were blown up were collateral damage, which the Pentagon defines as undesired damage or casualties produced by the effects from ‘friendly fire.’ ”

In the council’s Quarterly Review of Doublespeak, its editor, William Lutz of Rutgers University, noted that there are four kinds of doublespeak, and sought to define them.

Doublespeak has been in the language several years. In his preface to “Doublespeak Dictionary,” William Lamdin says he uses the word doublespeak to describe distorted language because “it recalls the doublethink and newspeak that George Orwell said are employed to make lies sound truthful and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.”

Lutz says that one of the four kinds of doublespeak is euphemism--that is, a word or phrase that is meant to avoid a harsh or distasteful reality. A euphemism used to spare someone’s feelings is not doublespeak--for example, passed away instead of died . But a euphemism used to mislead or deceive is doublespeak-- cleansed (as of a bombing site) instead of wiped out .

A second kind of doublespeak is jargon. When used by scientists or professionals in their internal communications, jargon is useful. When used to confuse the layman it is doublespeak.

A third kind of doublespeak is gobbledygook. This is language in which a large number of big and obscure words are piled one upon another with the intent of confusing, overwhelming or intimidating. It is bloated and obfuscatory.

As prime gobbledygook, Lutz quoted a statement by Alan Greenspan, a presidential economics adviser, in testimony before a Senate committee:

“It is a tricky problem to find the particular calibration in timing that would be appropriate to stem the acceleration in risk premiums created by falling incomes without prematurely aborting the decline in the inflation-generated premiums.”

Lutz defined gobbledygook as “a kind of language that pretends to communicate but does not.”

A fourth kind, according to Lutz, is inflated language. It is designed to make the commonplace seem important. It is inflated language to call a car mechanic an automotive internist, a garbage collector a sanitation engineer, or to call used cars previously enjoyed or experienced.

A foretaste of the kind of language we will be subjected to in the 1992 campaign may be found in the contributions of Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who was awarded second place.

Gingrich was recognized for a booklet issued to Republican politicians by a Republican group he heads. It was frankly called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” It suggested that Republican candidates, when speaking of themselves, use “optimistic, positive, governing words such as environment, peace, freedom, fair, flag, we/us/our, family, humane.” When speaking of opponents they were to use such contrasting words as “betray, sick, pathetic, lie, liberal, hypocrisy, permissive attitude, self-serving . . . “

It seems to me there is another kind of doublespeak that is not covered in Lutz’s four: It is deliberate distortion of the facts.

A fine example is then-Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s testimony before a Congressional committee on the murder of three American nuns and a Catholic lay worker by soldiers in El Salvador. The nuns had been raped and then shot at close range.

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.”

Haig implied that the nuns had run a roadblock; that the nuns had exchanged gunfire with the soldiers; that the soldiers were confused; that nobody knew the facts.

Beautiful.