Analyzing the World of Doublespeak

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Analyzing the World of Doublespeak Who is responsible for the proliferation of doublespeak? Just those who use it? The schools? The government? The media? We who hear it? Do you know how to spot doublespeak? These are all questions brought up by William Lutz’s essay the world of doublespeak, this isn’t something new to society, it is been used to through the ages as a way to manipulate a message to make it more easily acceptable by the general population. We will take a journey exploring several situations that have used doublespeak to manipulate the speaker’s message. Mr. Lutz has split doublespeak into four distinctive types; the first type is using a euphemism to mask an unpleasant reality. This can be to protect somebody’s feelings to avoid a particular subject or due to a cultural taboo. We all do this in our daily lives, were not going to come out and directly asked somebody in there screwing somebody, we to be more polite, will ask is that person has slept with or is in a relationship with the person we suspect to them of sleeping with. I believe we do this for two reasons, the first being we want to pretend that we have the social decorum not to ask a question in that blunt of away. The second reason is that in our society it is a cultural taboo to directly address someone’s sexual habits. In this situation, we would make the substitution because we do not want to offend our friend or coworker with a direct question. Now this can also be twisted to hide unpleasant things that we are required to report but do not want the general population to understand what is being said. In Mr. Lutz’s essay, he uses an example that in 1984 the US State Department announced that it would no longer use the word killing in its annual report on the status of human rights in countries around the world. Instead, it would use the phrase unlawful or arbitrary deprivation of
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