George Orwell Would Love This One!

The British author George Orwell, in his famous and influential novel 1984 (it gave us the original "Big Brother"), identified a concept now called doublespeak.

Webster's dictionary defines doublespeak with these words: evasive, ambiguous, high-flown language intended to deceive or confuse.

In his bestselling book Doublespeak, William Lutz notes that doublespeak is not an accident or a "slip of the tongue." Instead, it is a deliberate, calculated misuse of language.

Lutz provides several defining attributes of doublespeak:

• misleads
• distorts reality
• pretends to communicate
• makes the bad seem good
• avoids or shifts responsibility
• makes the negative appear positive
• creates a false verbal map of the world
• limits, conceals, corrupts, and prevents thought
• makes the unpleasant appear attractive or tolerable
• creates incongruity between reality and what is said or not said

As you might suspect, politicians are very fond of doublespeak. Sometimes, politicians need to tell people things that they may not want to hear. So they word it in such a way that it doesn't hurt so much. (During budget cuts, a teacher may be riffed. It's an acronym for "reduction in force. So much nicer than "fired" or sh*tcanned".)

It turns out now that the Bush Administration would like to send back to their home countries some of the people who have been detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for the past few years. There's a little problem, though.

A long-running effort by the Bush administration to send home many of the terror suspects held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has been stymied in part because of concern among United States officials that the prisoners may not be treated humanely by their own governments, officials said.

And I thought Bush was funny at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Or with his "Where are the WMD?" skit. But this is just priceless. (Maybe even funnier than Laura's standup routine last year.)