Language that deceives: Doublespeak (video)

The Film Archives (YouTube.com); Seth Auberon, Pfc. Sandoval (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Language used to deceive us: How Doublespeak distorts reality and corrupts thought

(The Film Archives, 1989 but premiered March 17, 2022) Book: amazon.com. "Doublespeak" (the term being Newspeak in Orwell's book 1984) is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words.

Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g., "downsizing" for business layoffs and "servicing the target" for military bombing), in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable.

Manufacturing Consent (Zeitgeist video)

It may also refer to intentional ambiguity in language or to actual inversions of meaning. In such cases, doublespeak disguises the nature of the truth. Doublespeak is most closely associated with political language.

The word is comparable to George Orwell's "Newspeak" and "Doublethink," as used in his book Nineteen Eighty-Four, though the term Doublespeak does not appear there.

The term doublespeak derives from two concepts in George Orwell's novel, "doublethink" and "Newspeak." Another variant, "doubletalk," also refers to deliberately ambiguous speech. It did exist at the time Orwell wrote his book, but the usage of "doublespeak" as well as of "doubletalk" in the sense emphasizing ambiguity clearly post-dates the publication of his dystopian book.

Parallels have also been drawn between doublespeak and Orwell's classic essay "Politics and the English Language," which discusses the distortion of language for political purposes.

In it he observes that political language serves to distort and obfuscate reality. His description of political speech is extremely similar to the contemporary definition of doublespeak: In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible…

Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness…the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. Where there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms…

The writer Edward S. Herman cited what he saw as examples of doublespeak and doublethink in modern society [9]. Herman describes in his book Beyond Hypocrisy the principal characteristics of doublespeak. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky comment in their book Manufacturing Consent:

• Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
• Reflections on Manufacturing Consent (babson.edu)

The Political Economy of the Mass Media that Orwellian doublespeak is an important component of is the manipulation of the English language in American media, through a process called dichotomization, a component of media propaganda involving "deeply embedded double standards in the reporting of news."

For example, the use of state funds by the poor and financially needy is commonly referred to as "social welfare" or "handouts," which the "coddled" poor "take advantage of." These terms, however, are not as often applied to other beneficiaries of government spending such as military arm manufacturers. More from Wiki