Word: doublespeak
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...second annual Conference on Schizophrenia, in Rochester, Dr. Murphy reported that the incidence of schizophrenia in the Republic of Ireland is nearly triple the rate of the disease among Irish in Canada and Northern Ireland. His conclusion: Irish doublespeak creates intolerable levels of ambiguity that help produce schizophrenia. Many researchers consider schizophrenia a genetic disorder, while others believe it is produced by cultural pressures. Dr. Murphy's view of the problem among the Irish goes down the middle: though schizophrenia probably requires a genetic predisposition, it is triggered more often where the Irish are unmixed with other races, less...
Like most analysts of Irish culture, Dr. Murphy (a Scot) assumes that Irish expression was shaped by nearly 800 years of English domination. "You get this very commonly in a defeated people where the new master never gets a straight answer," he said. "I would guess that doublespeak had something to do with the fact that the Irish family and community could not tolerate open hostility. It always had to be suppressed, and using double language enabled them to do it. For some, it is an enjoyable game. But for those with a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia, there...
Previous winners have included Nixon's press secretary Ron Ziegler, as well as the entire Mars candy company. This year the Public Doublespeak Award of the Illinois-based National Council of Teachers of English went to Yasser Arafat, 46, head of the militant Palestine Liberation Organization. Arafat's prizewinning formulation: "We do not want to destroy any people. It is precisely because we have been advocating coexistence that we have shed so much blood...
...have been appointed to translate legal and technical terminology into Hindi, a task complicated by the fact that one English term often comes out as a cumbersome and exotic train of several Hindi words ("telephone exchange," translated literally into Hindi, is "house of the distant voices"). Such bureaucracy by doublespeak is hardly apt to speed India's snail-slow governmental machinery, which at a time of increasing national difficulties needs just the opposite. Desks of West Bengal bureaucrats are already piled high with letters from opposite numbers in Uttar Pradesh, which they cannot read, much less answer, since...
...Order. Premier Chou submitted a ten-point program to the Congress; even in its vague generalities, translators of Communist doublespeak find admissions of China's severe economic crisis. Instead of the old slogans about "20 years of progress in a single day!", there seemed little hope now of doing more than feeding and clothing the Chinese people and supplying them with the barest necessities. The Communist leaders completely reversed the old policy of giving priority to heavy industry, which had nearly wrecked China's agriculture; the new demand was for "all-round balance" between branches of the economy...