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Who Is Doubletalk In William Lutz's The World Of Doublespeak

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We hear and read doublespeak every day, but if you were to ask a person what doublespeak was, they’ll more than likely have no clue what you’re talking about. What exactly is Doublespeak? Doublespeak, often called “soft language”, or “doubletalk”, is language that has been distorted or changed in order to make an unpleasant, difficult, or just negative situation not sound nearly as awful as it actually is. In his essay “The World of Doublespeak”, author William Lutz discusses the ways in which doublespeak is used, and the dangers of not being aware of when it is being used. Lutz writes that doublespeak is used so often that it is hard to identify when it’s even being used. Furthermore, he claims that doublespeak can destroy the function of …show more content…

The first kind of doublespeak is called euphemism. Euphemisms are used to soften a statement so that what they say does not sound harsh or unrelenting. This type of doublespeak is probably the most common; it’s almost imbedded in our culture to use these words now. Some examples are “passed away” instead of died, “on the streets” instead of homeless, or “elderly” instead of old. The second type is known as jargon. Jargon is lingo shared between members of a specialized group like doctors, lawyers, or educators. It becomes doublespeak when it is used to intimidate, confuse, or impress those who are not familiar with the terms. The third type of doublespeak is gobbledygook or bureaucratese. Gobbledygook is meant to sound impressive to an audience, but is essentially just a way of piling on as many words as possible in order to confuse them. The fourth type of doublespeak is inflated language; language designed to make something seem much more important than it is, like working for a “fortune 500 company”, rather than being a sale associate for Walmart. All of these types of doublespeak share one thing, that is, they are all used intentionally, and have one goal in mind, to conceal

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One example of figurative language in Laurie Hale Anderson’s book “Speak” is when Melinda decides to rid her garden of all weeds, and does some spring cleaning after it finally stops raining during May. Around the same time, Melinda is realizing that she wants to make some new changes in her life and in this figurative language example, Melinda’s life is her garden. She decides first to rake the leaves “suffocating the bushes” ; Melinda is ridding the demons from herself on the first layer of her skin. She says that she has to “fight the bushes (her problems)” and the bushes don’t like getting cleaned out but it is something one has to do if one makes

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In his essay “The World of Doublespeak,” William Lutz define doublespeak as “a blanket term for language which makes the bad seem good, the negative appear positive, the unpleasant attractive, or at least tolerable” (2013). Lutz goes on to claim “It is language which avoids, shifts, or denies responsibility” (2013). He explains the purpose of doublespeak is to “mislead, distort, deceive, inflate” (2103). Based on many of his examples, such as wording an airplane as an airplane that has had “uncontrolled contact with the ground,” or referring to a city slum as the resident of the “fiscal underachievers,” I feel he may overstate his own definition of doublespeak. While, the play on words in these examples does attempt to deceive the read and

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