Brussels (sprouts), Danish (pastries), hamburgers, frankfurters and sardines (from Sardinia). In the clothing world we find jeans, jerseys, bikinis, tuxedos and duffle coats.
But the process of making a word out of a place-name (a toponym) is widespread. Tell someone a limerick? Drive in a limousine? Own an alsatian or a labrador? Play badminton or rugby? Run in a marathon? Dance the mazurka? You never quite know where a place-name is going to turn up.
81. Doublespeak — weasel words (20th century)
In 1986, during the Australian ‘spycatcher’ trial, held to prevent the publication of a book by a former MI5 employee, the British cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, was asked by one of the lawyers to explain the difference between a misleading impression and a lie. ‘A lie is a straight untruth,’ he said. The lawyer suggested that a misleading impression, then, was ‘a sort of bent untruth’? Armstrong replied: ‘As one person said, it is perhaps being “economical with the truth”.’
He was referring to the 18th-century political philosopher Edmund Burke, who had once used the phrase ‘economy of truth’. But that usage didn’t enter the language in the way the new one did. To be economical with the truth came to be frequently quoted in the media and applied to other situations. It seems to have earned itself a permanent place in English idiom — one of the latest examples of doublespeak.
Doublespeak, or doubletalk, is a term known since the 1950s. It was prompted by George Orwell’s novel 1984 — a blend of his doublethink and newspeak. It describes any words which deliberately hide or change a meaning in order to achieve an ulterior motive. As the chair of the US Committee on Public Doublespeak said in 1973, it is language
which pretends to communicate, but really doesn’t. It is language which tries to make the bad seem good, the negative seem positive, or the unpleasant seem attractive, or at least tolerable. It is language which avoids or shifts responsibility…
The important point to stress is that this kind of language isn’t the result of lazy thinking. Rather, it’s the product of very clear thinking on someone’s part. Doublespeak has been carefully selected in order to mislead.
A factory reports that they have had a leak of biosolids from their plant. They mean ‘sewage’. An army reports a surgical strike on a town. They mean a ‘military attack’. One company says it is rightsizing. It means people are being sacked. Another says it is offering job flexibility. It means there are no permanent contracts. There is the hint in these cases that the new situation is a good thing. Bio- suggests life. Surgery suggests cure. Words like right and flexibility put a positive spin on a bad situation. Job seekers sounds better than unemployed, ethnic cleansing better than genocide.
It all depends on your point of view, of course. If an army is on your side, it intervenes in another country; if it isn’t, it invades. If an armed group is on your side, their members are freedom fighters; if not, they’re terrorists. People can lapse into doublespeak for the best of intentions, believing they are really helping a cause. When a country is at war, few would doubt the importance of positive spin in maintaining national morale. When a company is worried about its share prices, it will do what it can to present itself in the best possible light.
But there comes a point when the public feels that the spin has gone too far, and several of the phrases highlighted by doublespeak campaigns — not only in the USA — have become so famous that they have lost their obscuring force. Everyone now knows what friendly fire means: you’ve killed your own men. And only the most hidebound of press officers would these days say collateral damage (for a raid in which bystanders are killed or injured) without embarrassment, because every journalist present would know exactly what was meant.
The Doublespeak Committee decided to give annual awards for the worst examples. In 2008 it gave the award to the phrase aspirational goal — as used, for instance, when talking about setting a deadline for withdrawing troops from Iraq or for reducing carbon emissions. The Committee observed:
Aspirations and goals are the same thing; and yet when the terms are combined, the effect is to undermine them both, producing a phrase that means, in effect, ‘a goal to which one does not aspire all that much’.
In other words: nobody has done anything about this yet.
How to reduce doublespeak? One way is to praise linguistic honesty; and the Committee does give Orwell Awards for good practice. Satire also helps. I especially like the report of a chess match in which one of the players proudly reports that he came second.
82. Doobry — useful nonsense (20th century)
Or doobery, dooberry, doobrie, doobrey… It’s never obvious how to spell the invented forms we use to talk about an object whose name we don’t know. Fortunately it isn’t a problem, most of the time, because these nonsense words are usually used only when we speak. ‘Where’s the doobry?’ someone might say, looking for the gadget which controls the television.
Doobry is the latest in a series of doo- forms that appeared during the 20th century. It’s first recorded in British English in the 1970s. In earlier decades people used such forms as doodah, doofer, doodad, doings and dooshanks. Doodah seems to have been the first, recorded in 1928. Doofer came soon after, in the 1930s — probably derived from the phrase do for, as used in such sentences as that’ll do for now. Workmen used to describe half a cigarette as a doofer. It became popular in Australia, where it also appeared as doover and doovah. In American English, the favoured forms, from early in the century, were doohickey and doojigger, and both are still used. Doodad also developed a more specific meaning in the USA, referring to fancy ornaments or articles of dress. There might be all kinds of doodads on a Xmas tree, for instance.
Nonsense words are a hugely useful feature of speech. They help us out when we’re searching for a word and don’t want to stop ourselves in mid-flow. They’re a lifeline in cases where we don’t know what to call something, or have forgotten its name. And they’re available when we feel that something is not worth a precise mention or we want to be deliberately vague. Their importance is illustrated by the remarkable number of these words that have been coined over the centuries.
The oldest ones, recorded in writing since the 16th century, and likely to be much older in speech, are based on the word what. In their full form they appear as what do you call it/him/’em…, but they turn up in a wide range of contracted forms, such as whatdicall’um, whatchicalt and
