The New Doublespeak: Why No One Knows What Anyone's Saying Anymore

Doublespeak is language that is evasive, deceptive, self-contradictory, or misleading. It turns lies told by politicians into "strategic misrepresentations" or "reality augmentation," and ordinary sewage sludge into "regulated organic nutrients" that doesn't stink but merely "exceeds the odor threshold."

In this pithy sequel to his bestselling Doublespeak, Lutz exposes the latest prevarications that permeate our public discourse, dissecting how they work, and showing how they affect us as individuals and as a nation. Most important, he shows how to demand clear communication, become critical consumers of language, and fight doublespeak in our homes, schools, workplaces, and the political arena.

William Lutz, a professor of English at Rutgers University and former editor of the Quarterly Review of Doublespeak, has had enough of doublespeak--the inflated, involved and often deliberately ambiguous use of language or when "strategic misinterpretations" are used instead of lies. He argues that the practice has been growing in our culture, and he's right. In this book he reviews doubletalk by Democrats, Republicans, journalists, economists and Supreme Court justices, and shows how the repeated use of a phrase allows it to stay unchallenged in the lexicon. Say what you mean, argues Lutz, and we'll all be better off.