And now, the winners in the ‘deceit, duplicity and obfuscation’ competition . . . the envelopes, please

The National Council of Teachers of English has made its annual Doublespeak Awards for outstanding contributions to the language of deceit, duplicity and obfuscation.

As usual the council had a wealth of candidates to choose from. Doublespeak is the common language of politicians, public servants, industrial executives and educators in speaking to the public.

This year’s first-place award went to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and two defense contractors for their explanations of the Challenger disaster.

Any event that is likely to damage the esteem and credibility of public figures is certain to produce a tide of doublespeak designed to conceal the facts, confuse the public and exonerate the guilty. This year’s winners are spokesmen for NASA and for two contractors who built and equipped the shuttle craft. Their winning contributions were quoted from news media reports.

In making its awards the council looks for language that is “grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-contradictory,” and which has potentially “pernicious social or political consequences.” George Orwell himself could hardly have hoped for a more pernicious harvest of doublespeak than this year’s crop.

Here’s what one NASA administrator said when asked if the performance of the shuttle program had improved with each launch, or had remained the same:

“I think our performance in terms of the liftoff performance and in terms of the orbital performance, we know more about the envelope we were operating under, and we have been pretty accurately staying in that. And so I would say the performance has not by design drastically improved. I think we have been able to characterize the performance more as a function of our launch experience as opposed to it improving as a function of time.”

I have really tried to make sense out of that, and I can’t. It does not, in any case, answer the question.

Another NASA official explained: “The normal process during the countdown is that the countdown proceeds, assuming we are in a go posture, and at various points during the countdown we take up the operational loops and face to face in the firing room to ascertain the facts that project elements that are monitoring the data and that are understanding the situation as we proceed are still in the go direction.”

It is hard to say whether that paragraph represents the inability of technologists to speak ordinary English, or a deliberate attempt to obscure the facts.

An official of the shuttle’s main contractor explained how it had warned NASA against the launch: “I felt that by telling them we did not have a sufficient data base and could not analyze the trajectory of the ice, I felt he understood that (we were) not giving a positive indication we were for the launch.”

Evidently these people have as much trouble communicating with each other as they do with the public. Why couldn’t he simply have said, “Hey, we’re worried about the O-rings icing up. You’d better not launch”?

Asked why they had reversed earlier decisions not to launch the shuttle, officials of another contractor said the reversal was “based on the re-evaluation of those discussions.” The presidential commission investigating the accident suggested that this could mean there was pressure from NASA.

NASA also called the accident an “anomaly,” the bodies of the astronauts “recovered components,” and the coffins in which they were carried “crew transfer containers.”

Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III was awarded second prize for his comment criticizing the Supreme Court’s Miranda ruling, which gives suspects the right to have a lawyer present while police question them.

Asked if he didn’t think people who were innocent of any crimes should have such protection, Meese answered: “Suspects who are innocent of a crime should. But the thing is, you don’t have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That’s contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect. . . . Its (the Miranda decision’s) practical effect is to prevent the police from talking to the person who knows the most about the crime--namely, the perpetrator. . . . Miranda only helps guilty defendants. Most innocent people are glad to talk to the police. They want to establish their innocence so that they’re no longer a suspect.”

Certainly Meese deserves a prize for something; but I doubt that this statement is truly doublespeak. Actually, it seems to me that Meese is simply stating what he thinks, and with unaccustomed clarity: Innocent persons cannot be suspects. Police do not arrest innocent persons. People who are arrested are guilty. Police should be able to question them without the presence of legal counsel because they are guilty. Innocent people do not need lawyers because they are innocent.

The council gave honorable mention to the Air Force for explaining that a cruise missile that had crashed had merely “impacted with the ground prematurely,” and the test flight was “terminated five minutes earlier than planned.”

I see great hope, though, in a quotation ascribed by Newsweek to Roger Smith, chief executive officer of General Motors. Commenting on the Wall Street arbitrage scandal, Smith said:

“We have got to watch the corporate raiders. They destroy equity. They destroy jobs. They destroy communities. All for their own gain. That’s not right and it should not be allowed in America. Legitimate takeovers OK. Corporate raiders for their own profit, no good.”

If all our industrialists and administrators could speak with such blunt clarity as that, we would soon achieve full employment, restore the balance of payments in foreign trade and balance the national budget.