Obfuscation
Burying a simple fact under technical vocabulary, abstraction, and length, so that the audience cannot find it and either gives up or assumes the speaker knows best.
Where euphemism softens one word, obfuscation fogs the whole passage. The device works on two reactions at once: the audience cannot follow, so it cannot object; and the audience assumes that anything this complicated must be the product of expertise, so it defers. Length and jargon are cheap to produce and expensive to penetrate, and that asymmetry is the point.
Maury Maverick, a Texas congressman, coined "gobbledygook" in 1944 for the memoranda of wartime Washington. William Lutz later made it one of his four kinds of doublespeak. The test is simple: could the passage have been written plainly, and who benefits from the fact that it wasn't? Exploits Authority Bias and Cognitive Ease in reverse.
Historical examples
Maury Maverick, chairman of the Smaller War Plants Corporation, issued a memo in March 1944 ordering his staff to stop writing "gobbledygook language," a word he coined for the "pompous, wordy, involved" prose of wartime agencies, and to "be short and use plain English." The memo was reported nationally and the word stuck.
Maverick, Maury. Memorandum to Smaller War Plants Corporation staff, 30 March 1944; "Gobbledygook Warfare," The New York Times Magazine, 21 May 1944.
The 1980s produced "revenue enhancement" for tax increase, a phrase so fitted to the device that Lutz used it in the title of his book. The words were chosen so that a policy could be announced without the announcement being understood by the people who would pay for it.
Lutz, William. Doublespeak: From "Revenue Enhancement" to "Terminal Living." New York: Harper & Row, 1989.
In advertising and commerce
Studies of consumer contracts and privacy policies have found that reading the agreements an average user accepts in a year would take weeks, and that the documents are written at reading levels far above the public's. The effect, whether or not intended in every case, is that the terms are agreed to unread, which is the device operating at scale.
McDonald, Aleecia M., and Lorrie Faith Cranor. "The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies." I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society 4, no. 3 (2008): 543–568; Bakos, Yannis, Florencia Marotta-Wurgler, and David R. Trossen. "Does Anyone Read the Fine Print?" Journal of Legal Studies 43, no. 1 (2014): 1–35.
Find a paragraph of terms and conditions, a policy document, or a press release you can't follow. Write the one sentence it is hiding. How long did it take you to find it?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
"Going forward, we will be leveraging cross-functional synergies to optimize our customer-facing cost architecture."
What to notice. A plain fact, probably a price rise or a cut in service, is fogged with jargon until it can't be found.
The fee appears in paragraph 41 of a 60-page agreement, in a sentence 140 words long.
What to notice. The number is disclosed and buried; length and structure keep the reader from reaching it.
"The recalibration of the fiscal envelope necessitates a revenue enhancement posture."
What to notice. A tax rise, stated so that the sentence must be translated before it can be objected to.
Sources
- Lutz, William. Doublespeak. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. ISBN 978-0060161347
- McDonald, Aleecia M., and Lorrie Faith Cranor. "The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies." I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society 4, no. 3 (2008): 543–568.
- Bakos, Yannis, Florencia Marotta-Wurgler, and David R. Trossen. "Does Anyone Read the Fine Print?" Journal of Legal Studies 43, no. 1 (2014): 1–35. doi:10.1086/674424
- Orwell, George. "Politics and the English Language." Horizon 13, no. 76 (April 1946).