Few other books shed as much light as this does on the deliberate attempts by industry, government, and professionals to use technobabble to confuse and distract "Joe and Jane Average" from the truth.

If you want to be a smart consumer, and avoid being suckered by ANYBODY, this is an essential book to have in your possession. Paired with books such as "Influence" by Cialdini, and "Trance-Formations" by Bandler and Grinder, this prepares the average person for the mind war that is waged daily on us all. This book is a combined crap detector and phrase guide for the made-up, misleading, and outright false "language" that routinely bombards us in an attempt to avoid saying what is REALLY meant.

It's not "NEW!" It's not "IMPROVED!" But it is essential reading for the every day person, and the persuasion professional

Lutz's point in this book is that politicians, lawyers, economists etc. use language deceptively in public discourse by redefining terms, coming up with "meaningless" terms to replace others that are deemed less palatable, or even lying. In the modern political and business climate, the thesis is one with which most of us would or should agree. After seven years of the Mighty Clinton Spin Machine ("draconian cuts", "risky tax scheme", "I did not have sexual relations with that woman..."), the power of deceptive language is obvious and frightening. However, despite the fact that most conservative readers will share Lutz's distaste for spin (as Rush Limbaugh says, "Words mean things."), they will find themselves, as I did, strangely distanced from the discussion. That's because Lutz's political leanings are so clearly liberal and so clearly evident in the text. Aside from about 3 pages dealing with Clinton-Gore and two brief discussions of college speech codes, almost every example he cites is from Reagan, Bush, Haig, big business, etc. He deals with Bush's "No new taxes" pledge, but ignores Clinton's similar promise not to "raise taxes on the middle class". He discusses how big businesses fighting environmental programs often choose innocuous or environmentally-friendly sounding names to "disguise" their true intentions without mentioning the irony of the fact that groups like "Greenpeace" often use methods that are often far from peaceful. The book is filled with such imbalanced discussions.This is not only frustrating and off-putting, it borders on hypocritical. On the surface Lutz seems to be claiming (rightfully) that people in public life should stop trying to redefine or come up with new terms that mislead or obfuscate. They should use words with the meanings that are commonly accepted by society at large. However, as the political bias in his examples demonstrates, Lutz believes that society at large is primarily made up of people who share the liberals' definition of terms. In other words, it's doublespeak when conservatives use terms that don't agree with the liberal worldview, but when Lutz throws around terms like sludge, fired, or slaughter, or when he takes words out of context (such as his comments about a William Safire passage), or when he treats as irrelevant the meaningful distinction between good faith and bad faith warrantless searches these are considered examples of the responsible use of language.His ideas are too interesting and too important to civil and truthful discourse in our society to be presented in such a one-sided and politically charged fashion.

Taking on the the ideas that George Orwell introduced in his groundbreaking essay on politics and the English language, William Lutz attempts to show how certain people in a position of power use "doublespeak" to mislead the public about their often unethical and illegal actions.

Now "doublespeak" is no small task to handle. To approach it effectively, you must be two things: 1. An expert on the English language and 2. A person who takes a position of neutrality, since neutrality is needed to study language and the very political establishment you accuse of misrepresenting it. It seems as if Mr. Lutz, when it comes to language, knows what he is talking about. But in terms of neutrality, he fails miserably.

The biggest fault of this book is that Mr. Lutz, himself being biased, too often slips from giving true cases of doublespeak into using doublespeak to denounce certain attitudes that he himself doesn't agree with. One of the worst cases was in one chapter where he contrasted two examples of doublespeak at two colleges. Both universities made decisions that Lutz personally did not like. In the first case, a college student was expelled for saying racial epithets, based on that college's policy against discrimination and racism. In the second case, a group of minority students weren't severely punished for trashing an entire edition of the school newspaper out of protest of that university's "overt racism." Mr. Lutz felt that in the first case, the student was unfairly expelled and that in the second, the group of students weren't rightly punished. He then goes on to explain why each school's administration used "doublespeak" to support their decisions.

In these examples, Mr. Lutz couldn't have been more off the mark. In fact, in explaining his views, he actually shows his bias in each case. In the first situation, he labels as "doublespeak" the university's explanation of why the expulsion of its student wasn't contradicting its own policy towards allowing free speech. He wonders if the student would have been expelled had he yelled things like, "The Republicans are bad," or "Newt Gingrich is terrible." But here Lutz makes a mistake in his wish to "prove" that the college administration's decision to expell the student was wrong. He confuses "hate speech"-- a deliberate act of speaking derogatively towards historically discrimnated minorities and groups-- with speech that merely reflects your hatred of something. Those are two completely different things. It was this distinction that the university's explanation was making. Yet in his zeal, Lutz seemed to miss that point, instead choosing to see it as "doublespeak." But it gets worse. In the second case, Lutz makes his bias even more evident. He calls the act of the minority students who trashed copies of the school newspaper "criminal." Criminal? Why the strong words. Mr. Lutz? Foolish, yes. Punishable by some action? Of course. But criminal? Of course not. Mr. Lutz ends this example with a huff, saying that the students had no right to dump the school newspaper because they didn't like what was written in it. Lutz seemed to overlooked the fact that they dumped the newspapers as a protest over the overt racism at the university, NOT because they didn't like what was printed in it. This is something that is even expressed in the very quote from the students that Lutz himself put in his book. But Lutz, apparently not liking their actions, distorted their intentions to prove his point, reducing an act of protest about racism into an act of "criminality" and suppression of free speech. And because he did not like what they did or was displeased by the lack of disciplinary action by school administration, labeled all statements made in this case as "doublespeak."

However, the worst case of Lutz's bias shows itself in his picking apart of William Safire's piece defending the CIA. Now Lutz is really stretching here, finding "doublespeak" in everything Safire has written. But what Safire writes is not "doublespeak," just merely a biased article about CIA activity. To use slanted words is not doublespeak; it is merely using words that merely reflect your skewed version of reality. That is a huge difference from purposely selecting words that will create ambiguity in the minds of your readers or listeners. Safire's version of the CIA's past activities may be distasteful and at times highly inaccurate, but sorry, Mr. Lutz, his version was not double speak at all.

This "problem" of Mr. Lutz's-- his bias-- is what eventually defeats the good intentions of the book. By the time he ends it, he loses his focus. He starts off seeming to know what double speak is, but then loses that knowledge when he starts attacking certain public figures like Alan Greenspan. Because of this, Lutz ironically makes the very subtle shift in meaning in his definition of doublespeak that he accuses his targets of doing.

"Doublespeak" is an interesting, yet flawed work. If you read it, I would do so with a grain of salt because like I said, Lutz eventually loses focus. But if you become interested in this topic, then may I suggest "1984," the novel by George Orwell that started it all.

In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord delved into the myriad of ways that modern society has been spectacularized through the mind-numbing assault by PR firms, advertisers and the media, in reiterating a culture where capitalism is presented as the only possible means of human existence. The spectacle that results from a culture where 24 hour coverage of even the most insignificant of events, such as, Madonna's wedding, Lady Di's death, or the OJ trial--all interspersed with an endless onslaught of Nike ads, sitcom drivel--works explicitly to confuse and sedate the public (consumers)--insulating them from the unpleasant realities of war, famine and environmental destruction. Thus, the image becomes the preferred tool of domination and the medium of modern propaganda.

In the same way, William Lutz seeks to expose the ways in which language is manipulated and transformed from units of meaning into a complex code of evasion and linguistic subterfuge. Contrary to what some say language and its meaning is never dependent upon neutrality, it is, instead, always the subjective, creation of the speaker/author. De Saussure pointed out that language is indeed an arbitrary creation, the meaning of which is dependent on little more than the whims of its speakers. As Lutz points out it is precisely in the realm of meaning that understanding the jargon of doublespeak becomes vital.

For example, the word "downsizing" is employed day in day out on the news to express what would be more appropriately described as the firing or laying off of employees. Or, to employ current doublespeak we could choose to call this same act: eliminating redundancies in the human resources area or destaffing., Then again, we could also say that the employees were derecruited, deselected, dis-employed, outplaced, non-retained or idled indefinitely. The point of this little exercise is to illustrate the often complex ways that language is becoming increasingly jargon-laden and obscured for the express purpose of concealing and obfuscating its meaning, and thus, managing our reactions to it, be that from our government, corporations, health care providers or media outlets.

In Orwell's 1984 the vital role of language in a free society is explicitly investigated and as history as shown the manipulation of language and meaning is a basic tool of modern war. Whether called propaganda or the manufacture of consent, the effect of the resulting manipulation of public sentiment is primarily the same. Perhaps, as a result of these views you may consider William Lutz a bit hypervigilant, in need of enrollment to a labor reform camp for ideological re-education. On the Contrary, when, as Lutz illustrates, words no longer are used to express meaning, but are used merely as devices to conceal and obscure meaning we must question the underlying reasons for this practice.

For example, consider the difference between a "freedom fighter" and a "terrorist". What is the difference? It seems that the only difference tends to lie on whether or not those in question are fighting as allies or enemies to national security interests of the US. A fine illustration of the publics basic inability to discern the seriousness of this problem is expresses by the public outcry over Timothy McVeigh's comments concerning the killing of children, which he referred to as "collateral damage." The point being that McVeigh was simply using the military terminology (doublespeak) for the killing of civilian non-combatants, something that causes not even a blink when used to describe the bombing of civilian populations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Serbia, Viet Nam, etc. It is precisely, this type of selective condemnation that Lutz wants to bring to public attention and unless the killing of civilians is condemned on universal grounds, people will always find ways to justify its use as a military asset, with words as their preferred weapon of evasion.

William Lutz is out to save us from the doublespeak ogres. In this his third book on the subject Lutz provides hundreds of obtuse and difficult examples of contorted language from a variety of fields. The primary offenders, of course, are big government and big industry. Lutz assures the reader that his book is a "survival manual for the contemporary linguistic jungle." Without his help we might succumb to the confusing "substance abuse" and "passanger facility charges" of this brave new world.

Taken with an appropriate grain of salt, the book makes delightful reading for all of us normal, honest, truthful folk who must beware the doublespeak ogres all around us.