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Jewish World Review / June 18, 1998 / 24 Sivan, 5758
Paul Greenberg
I WAS SORRY TO HEAR about the death of Harry Stanley, who died in
the Actors Home in Englewood, N.J., at the age of 100 --- just as a
promising political career was opening for someone with his
considerable talent for doublespeak.
You may have seen Harry Stanley on one of the variety shows
years ago; he was an old vaudevillian who appeared with
pince-nez and distinguished mien. He would start out delivering a
dull but respectable speech on some elevated topic ("The Role of
Foreign Policy in the Life of the Nation") and then slowly, by
almost undetectable degrees, proceed to grand perorations like
this one:
"However, I for one feel that all the basic and sadum tortumise,
all the professional getesimus and torum kimafly, despite its
framatical linguistations, will precipitously aggregate so that
peace shall reign. I want to make that perfectly clear."
The challenge, as with some of the Nineties' leading statesmen,
was to see how long he could go before it became clear to even
the dimmest member of the audience that he was spouting word
salad. The rhythm of Harry Stanley's vaguely latinate vocabulary
was so perfect that it sounded as if he should be
making sense.
To quote his obit in the New York Times, "when he got wound
up, it took a while before it became apparent that nobody had the
foggiest idea what he was talking about." After a time, as the joke
grew broader and broader, the puzzled expressions in the crowd
would turn to scattered titters, and the whole audience would be
smiling at an oration that was 99.44 percent unintelligible, much
like tax law or the latest research paper in pure educantion.
Only then would "Doctor" Stanley give the game away,
explaining in the most serious, oh-so-sober tones: "For those of
you who missed my introduction, I'm Professor Harry Stanley,
Harvard '39, Rutgers, nothing."
The man clearly missed his time (now) and place (Washington).
Bureaucratic doublespeak supplanted English as the national
language at about the time POTUS, FLOTUS and SCOTUS
replaced the president, first lady, and Supreme Court of the
United States. Or as David Goldstein of the Knight Ridder papers
noted awhile back in a story out of Washington, nominees to high
office can now be routinely Borked or Hatched by smear artists,
aka oppo guys. Ask for the ISTEA in Washington, and somebody
may hand you a transportation budget.
Bob Dole, who spoke poli-speke like a Senate majority leader,
used to justify some of his more enigmatic utterances by saying he
was only using a wedge issue to influence swing voters like
soccer moms and suburban-values Democrats.
Just as English is an amalgam of other tongues, so poli-speke is
heavily influenced by the brittle lingo of pollsters, pols,
bureaucrats and speechwriters. This burgeoning language, or
non-language, can be fully understood only by adepts inside the
Beltway. For fluency in polispeak comes only with an
understanding of The Process, a term pronounced as if it were
capitalized, like God.
Harry Stanley must have felt right at home in his declining years
at the Actors Home, where he spoke regularly. On first hearing
him, it is said, new members of the staff would figure he was just
another old guy who had lost his mind, while new residents of the
home would wonder if they'd lost theirs.
I can understand both reactions, having experienced much the
same doubts when watching C-SPAN in the middle of the night at
the low ebb of the caffeine cycle. It takes a while and an alert
mind to decide whether the problem is you or the politician,
though this does not exclude the possibility that it's both. Once
you begin to understand the jargon or, infinitely worse, speak it,
all is lost, for nothing is more corrupting than corrupt language.
You can tell a lot about where a country is heading by noticing
where the language is. And politics is scarcely the only aspect of
the culture in which vaguely impressive words now substitute for
thought. It seems to be happening everywhere.
Out in Silicon valley, the folks who still have real language have
taken to playing something called Buzzword Bingo. It's a game in
which standard terms from today's meaningless execuspeak are
assembled on a bingo-like card, and workers solemnly check off
each one when visiting execs commit them.
The terms are depressingly familiar by now: incent, proactive,
impactfulness, utilize, the ball's in your court, on the same page,
step up to it, information superhighway, turf protection, customer
service, stakeholder. ... Dilbert would love it. It's not easy to
decide which is more American, this subversive bingo game or
the corporatespeak it mocks.
To quote a story in Monday's Wall Street Journal: "Players sit in
meetings and silently check off buzzwords as their bosses spout
them; the first to fill in a complete line wins. But, in deference to
the setting, the winner typically coughs instead of shouting out
``bingo.'' It occurs that Buzzword Bingo might add some interest
to the candidate interviews that editorial writers conduct during
election season.
Doublespeak is scarcely a new phenomenon. It's been half a
century now since George Orwell coined the term in Nineteen
Eighty-Four. As he noted in his ever-fresh essay "Politics and
the English Language": "Political speech and writing are largely
the defence of the indefensible." By now the process has gone far beyond that simple level. Today political language has become largely the explanation of the
Adventures in poli-speke
The man was an Al Gore ahead of his time, a world champion of
doublespeak when it was a subtle joke rather than the lingua
franca of politics. A phrase like Controlling Legal Authority
would have fit unobtrusively into his act.
