776 Stupidest Things Ever Said (13 page)

It’s a great role and you’ll play it to the tilt.

I think I’ve made a difference in my phase of the broadcast industry, but I don’t think I’ve impacted on the world in the manner of Franklin Roosevelt.

I’m not trying to compare myself with Roosevelt, but he couldn’t walk either.

Those who vote for this bond issue will be putting a rope around their necks which will suck at their vitals like a deadly vampire.

At the Lincoln Park traps on Sunday … over 80 shooters took part in the program. Rotarians, Be patriotic! Learn to shoot yourself.

Under the rules of the contest, any concrete canoe that sinks directly to the bottom of Round Pond is not allowed to continue in the race.

I’m very sorry, but I ran like a fire hydrant.

In all other respects, he’s done a very good job.

There are two kinds of languages that deserve a special nod of the head. We’re talking about the pseudolanguages used by the academic and the bureaucrat—acadamese and bureaucratese.

These are fatty, high-cholesterol languages. They use big words when small ones will do just as well. They use jargon words instead of words we all understand. They often employ confusing syntax, filled with ands, ors, and buts, commas, semicolons, and dashes. They are marked by confusing statements and intricate, technical-sounding explanations that sound like they’re filled with meaning. Until someone bothers to analyze them.

For example, if you’re in the government, and someone asks you how the redecorating of your house is going, you never just say, “Fine.” Instead, as Walter Annenberg, then ambassador to Great Britain, said to the Queen of England, you say:

We’re in the embassy residence, subject, of course, to some of the discomfiture as a result of a need for elements of refurbishments and rehabilitation.

Much better.

The trick, then, is to speak long-windedly and carry a big shtick.

And while you’re at it, try to make up new words, preferably with hyphens. That’s how we get such gems as: “non-ecological boundary” instead of “fence”; “personnel backload” (meaning withdrawal of troops); “physical
freeway” instead of “corridor”; and the ever popular CIA-coined “termination with extreme prejudice.”

Every year, the Committee on Public Doublespeak of the National Council of Teachers, headed by William Lutz, gives awards for the “best” examples of the year. It must be a tough job. There’s so much of this stuff around. It’s a twentieth-century bonanza of obfuscation.

One common use of this language is to “nuance” the facts—you sort of tell the truth but make it sound much nicer. If the listener doesn’t watch himself, he may think you’re saying the opposite of what you’re really saying.

Advertisers are masters of this. They use such dubious actfectives as “re-manufactured,” “genuine imitation,” or (even classier) “genuine faux.” This means “fake.” Car dealers sell “pre-owned” cars. This means “used.”

Government agencies get even more verbose, covering up the facts with strings of technical gibberish. For example, a Federal Aviation Administration report talked about the “premature impact of the aircraft with the terrain below.” This means the airplane crashed. During the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor disaster, officials talked about the possibility of a “rapid energetic disassembly.” This means the reactor might explode.

Press secretaries, in particular, are proponents of “carefully crafted nuanced answers.” During Watergate, Ron Ziegler explained that President Nixon made “inoperative statements.” He “misspoke.” Larry Speakes explained that President Reagan spoke with “misprecision.” Lies? Not exactly. Truth? Not exactly either.

In short, the problem with this high-fat diet of words and symbols is that it
clogs the brain. Thoughts are crowded out by words. People are deceived. No one knows what is going on.

But isn’t that the point?

Alexander Haig, one of the masters of the art of confusing speech, may have summed up academese and bureaucratese best when, during a March 1981 Time interview, he explained:

No, no. I’m not saying anything of the kind; in fact, I’m very consciously avoiding saying anything.

Exactly.

• Alongside the synchronicity inherent in the sociotext, the ideological construction of the subject may be explored in a diachronic direction. Given all the variables that come into play in the sociotext, the represented and the empirical worlds meet as two correlatives without becoming fused. By now I hope it is evident that the sociotext does not refer to an instance derived from sociocritique (yet both meet at crucial points) or from sociology, or sociolinguistics, or social psychology.
  

  Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz, University of Utrecht, in her essay, “Sieving the matriheritage of the sociotext,” in
  The Difference Within,
  edited by E. Meese and Alice Parker
  

• Despite all the deprecation I cannot bring myself to accept the
  notion that the inter-relation among our men and women has departed.
  

  President Warren G. Harding
  

• By a yea-and-nay vote of 337 yeas to 76 nays, Roll No. 57, the House disagreed to the Senate amendment to the House amendment to the Senate amendment to the House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 3128, to provide for reconciliation pursuant to section 2 of the first concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 1986 (S. Con. Res. 32, Ninety-ninth Congress) returning the measure to the Senate.
  

  voting on a budget reconciliation measure recorded in a 1986 Congressional Record
  

• Post-modernism needs to be dealt with in the same manner as modernism, that is, as either exclusive or inclusive. The definition of exclusive post-modernism depends on a conception of exclusive modernism. Exclusive post-modernism wants to invert exclusive modernism and, in the process, destroy it…. Inclusive post-modernism is merely the latest stage of inclusive modernism, that is, modernism that encompasses post-modernism. Thus, both exclusive post-modernism and pluralism are opposed to exclusive modernism. But pluralism is broader than exclusive post-modernism, since it views art as open in every direction, including that of exclusive modernism.
  

  Irving Sandler, art critic, in a 1980
  Art Journal,
  as quoted by
  Spy
  

• I am concerned that with modern communications there is a penchant for episodic emphasis.
  

  Alexander Haig, then Secretary of State, commenting in
  Time
  magazine on media coverage of El Salvador
  

• Concretely my class’ study of hamburgers not only involved English and philosophy in our use of writing, reading, and conceptual analysis, but it also included economics in the study of the commodity relations which bring hamburgers to the market, history, and sociology in an assessment of what the everyday diet was like before the rise of the hamburger, and health science in terms of the nutritional value of the ruling burger.
  

  Ira Shor, professor at the City University of New York (quoted in a
  New York Times
  op-ed column by author and teacher Rachel Erlanger)
  

• Notice is hereby given that the applications listed in the attached appendix are accepted for filing. Because the applications listed in the attached appendix are in conflict with applications which were accepted for filing and listed previously as subject to a cutoff date for conflicting applications, no application which would be in conflict with the applications listed in the attached appendix will be accepted for filing.
  

  a Federal Communications Commission public notice, circa 1983, on applications being accepted for FM broadcast licenses (chosen as a “Memo of the Month” by
  The Washington Monthly)
  

• It is true that some rhetorics have denied their imbrication in ideology, doing so in the name of a disinterested scientism. More recently, the discussion of the relation between ideology and rhetoric
  has taken a new turn. Ideology is here foregrounded and problematized in a way that situates rhetoric within ideology, rather than ideology within rhetoric.
  

  James Berlin, English professor at Purdue University, from his article “Rhetoric and Ideology,” in the magazine of the National Council of Teachers of English,
  College English
  (quoted in a
  New York Times
  op-ed column by author and teacher Rachel Erlanger)
  

• Both the black and white teachers studied emitted few reinforcements and those emitted tended to be traditional (distant, reinforcers), although most teachers stated a preference for proximity reinforcers (material rewards and close personal contact).
  

  from a
  Journal of Educational Psychology
  article
  

• The most important consequence might well be that the theory of autopoetic systems seems to bar all ways back to an anthropological conception of man. It precludes, in other words, humanism…. This means we have to invent new conceptual artificialities in order to give an account of what we see when we meet someone who looks and behaves like a human being. How do we know that he is one?
  

  Niklas Luhman, “The Individuality of the Individual,”
  Reconstructing Individualism
  

• It is a tricky problem to find the particular calibration in timing that would be appropriate to stem the acceleration in risk premiums created by falling incomes without prematurely aborting the decline in the inflation-generated risk premiums.
  

  Alan Greenspan, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, in testimony before a Senate committee
  

• [We] must continue to be deeply concerned about abuses to human rights wherever they occur; but, there are such questions as whether amelioration of those abuses is best achieved under the glare of public criticism and animosity and confrontation, or whether it is best achieved in a quieter dialogue between states with a healthy relationship.
  

  Alexander Haig, Secretary of State, in response to a
  Time
  reporter’s question of whether he thought human rights diplomacy should be conducted privately instead of through Congress
  

• The management of information requires organizing and structuring data into conceptually clear and logical component ideas that can be transmitted in forms that are user-friendly.
  

  from a New York City Board of Education memo
  

• Concretizing Mission … capacity building of personnel resources and personal abilities of central board of education, districts and school to facilitate generating vehicles to assist schools in nurturing student achievement.
  

  from a memo written by the New York City director of the Office of Professional Development and Leadership Training, when asked by the schools chancellor to report to him about her most pressing problems and how she was intending to solve them
  

• At the moment, we are subsumed in the vortex of criticality.
  

  Alexander Haig, then Secretary of State
  

• At such a time, the stimulation of trans-national linkages necessary for meaningful two-way communication must supersede
  propagandistic and chauvinistic functions which in the past constituted too large a share of our activities.
  

  Joseph Daniel Duffey, Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, in a written public statement about the work his bureau did
  

• I think our performance in terms of the liftoff performance and in terms of orbital performance, we knew more about the envelope we were operating under, and we have been pretty accurately staying in that. And so I would say the performance has not by design drastically improved. I think we have been able to characterize the performance more as a function of our launch experience as opposed to it improving as a function of time.
  

  a NASA administrator, being interviewed during the official investigation of the space shuttle
  Challenger
  explosion, replying to a question about whether the performance of the shuttle program improved with each launch
  

• The criticality in answering your question, sir, would be a real foot race as to which one would be considered more critical, depending on the particular time that you looked at your experience with that.
  

  a NASA official testifying about the space shuttle
  Challenger
  explosion (Nom-NASA, Morton Thiokol, and Rockwell International were awarded the 1986 “Doublespeak” award)
  

People think we make $3 million and $4 million a year. They don’t realize that most of us only make $500,000.

It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.