William Lutz is an American linguist who specializes in the use of plain language and the avoidance of doublespeak (deceptive language). He wrote a famous essay “The World of Doublespeak” on this subject as well as the book Doublespeak, which described the four different types of doublespeak (euphemism, jargon, gobbledygook, and inflated language) and the social dangers of doublespeak.
My understanding was it was a conceptually-poor language that artificially constrained one’s cognitive faculties through the nexus of a limited language/vocabulary emphasizing economy of expression. Sort of like a programming language with very few keywords and only ones that were absolutely necessary to receive and nominally participate in a minimal discourse.
Edit: I think this is actually Newspeak I’m contemplating as opposed to doublespeak. Doublespeak seems to refer to intentionally ambiguous language that obfuscates meaning and emotional content and usually for a political purpose. Like calling unintentional war victims “collateral damage” to reduce the bad publicity from one’s war efforts. The wrongfully-dead victims are hidden behind what sounds like oblique accounting or financial jargon.
If you haven’t, take some time to read 1984. It’s a fairly easy read and this thread will make a lot more sense. Also, there’s a reason it’s a timeless classic and referred to so often - Orwell hit on a lot of prevalent themes authoritarians like to use. Once you know how to identify them, it’s easy to see when someone is using something like double speak (consciously or subconsciously)
well the two aren’t necessarily exclusive. A speech pattern that obfuscates has many uses. But I think you’re conflating doublespeech and doublethink a bit.
(Fun fact: the term Doublespeak / speech is never actually used in 1984. Like, at all. It gets thrown in because of the doublethink concept, and the fact that everyone weaselwords, but it’s not actually used in the book.)
https://www.igpub.com/doublespeak/#:~:text=He wrote a famous essay,the social dangers of doublespeak.
Don’t forget the first summary:
“Doublespeak is the language of non-responsibility, carefully constructed to appear to communicate when it fact it doesn’t”
My understanding was it was a conceptually-poor language that artificially constrained one’s cognitive faculties through the nexus of a limited language/vocabulary emphasizing economy of expression. Sort of like a programming language with very few keywords and only ones that were absolutely necessary to receive and nominally participate in a minimal discourse.
Edit: I think this is actually Newspeak I’m contemplating as opposed to doublespeak. Doublespeak seems to refer to intentionally ambiguous language that obfuscates meaning and emotional content and usually for a political purpose. Like calling unintentional war victims “collateral damage” to reduce the bad publicity from one’s war efforts. The wrongfully-dead victims are hidden behind what sounds like oblique accounting or financial jargon.
Are you thinking of newspeak?
Whoops, lol. Is he talking about, like, George Bush or something. I’m so lost right now and he hasn’t provided a single example to work from
If you haven’t, take some time to read 1984. It’s a fairly easy read and this thread will make a lot more sense. Also, there’s a reason it’s a timeless classic and referred to so often - Orwell hit on a lot of prevalent themes authoritarians like to use. Once you know how to identify them, it’s easy to see when someone is using something like double speak (consciously or subconsciously)
I’ve read it and seen the movie, just been a while and OP wasn’t super helpful pinpointing what he was after
well the two aren’t necessarily exclusive. A speech pattern that obfuscates has many uses. But I think you’re conflating doublespeech and doublethink a bit.
(Fun fact: the term Doublespeak / speech is never actually used in 1984. Like, at all. It gets thrown in because of the doublethink concept, and the fact that everyone weaselwords, but it’s not actually used in the book.)
Thanks for this!
Np!
There’s a couple different variants, and OP is most likely talking about 1984, but the core idea is pretty much the same