The New Doublespeak: Why No One Knows What Anyone's Saying Anymore.

This book is a sequel to Doublespeak: From Revenue Enhancement to Terminal Living in which the author continues to document the latest doublespeak that tries to pass as legitimate communication. Lutz considers doublespeak as language that is evasive, deceptive, self-contradictory, or misleading. So killing enemy soldiers is simply a case of "servicing the target" after which the bodies of the dead are called "decommissioned aggressor quantum." Lies told by politicians become "strategic misrepresentations," "reality augmentation," or "terminological inexactitudes." The book is replete with examples of ridiculous doublespeak (including a "doublespeak quiz" which might make a fun party game).

Lutz brings great expertise to this subject. He was the editor of the Quarterly Review of Doublespeak for fourteen years and is a professor of English at Rutgers University and a member of the Pennsylvania bar. In addition to documenting doublespeak in law, business, and politics he makes a plea for responsible use of language: "Language is not irrelevant to the foundations of an orderly society; it is essential. The irresponsible use of language leads to the destruction of the social, moral, and political structure that is our society, our culture, our nation."

Lutz offers a wide variety of strategies (some derived from general semantics) to help us use language more responsibly. He has such subheadings as "the word is not the thing," "reports, inferences, and judgments," "verbal maps," "semantic environments," and he mentions several well-known anecdotes found in the general semantics literature. However, other than referring to Korzybski in one footnote and a few references to general semantics authors in the bibliography, Lutz never specifically mentions general semantics in the book. That's unfortunate for a number of reasons, particularly since he urges his readers to write to their school boards to ask that the rational study of language be included in the curriculum. I admit my bias, but we could do worse than incorporate general semantics into the training offered to students to enable them to use language in a rational way.

Martin H. Levinson, Ph.D.