Forensic Research Archive of Manipulation and Exploitation
Illustration: a redacted Cold War intelligence-dossier collage centred on a world map of influence operations, with the U.S. Capitol among the evidence.

Techniques · Rhetorical

Euphemism / doublespeak

Euphemism is a propaganda technique that replaces a concrete harm or act with a sanitizing or inflating phrase. The operational word, such as kill, censor, pay or lie, goes missing and a gerund or acronym sits in its place, so evaluation never meets the thing itself. Orwell described it as doublespeak. Technical terms used with a glossary are not euphemism.

See 32 euphemism / doublespeak examples in the archive

Illustration, not an archive object

Also called Doublespeak, Newspeak, Sanitizing language

Replace a concrete harm or act with a sanitizing or inflating phrase so evaluation never meets the thing.

How to spot Euphemism / doublespeak: the tell

The operational word (kill, censor, pay, lie) is missing; a gerund or acronym sits in its place.

What Euphemism / doublespeak is not

Technical terms used with a glossary.

History and effect of Euphemism / doublespeak propaganda

The subject of Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" and of the NCTE's annual Doublespeak Award, which tracks the device in government and corporate language.

It prevents the audience from forming the negative reaction the plain word would trigger, by never letting them see the plain word.

Lineage: Orwell; NCTE Doublespeak Award

How Euphemism / doublespeak propaganda works

Euphemism replaces the word that names an act with one that names something milder, more technical or more abstract, so the audience evaluates the substitute. A few moves recur. Abstraction turns a verb into a noun of process ("treatment", "operation", "resettlement"). Borrowed register uses the language of administration or medicine ("assembly center", "collateral damage"). Purpose-naming uses the goal claimed for an act as its name ("pacification", "vocational education"). Initials add distance ("EITs"). Deleting the agent removes the doer ("mistakes were made"). Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" gave examples from his own time: when villages are bombed and their inhabitants driven out, "this is called pacification"; political language, he wrote, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable". Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) gave the related idea a name, "Newspeak": a fictional state language built to shrink the range of thought. The word is now used loosely for official euphemism in general, and the page uses "euphemism" for the real-world practice.

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In propaganda the device is usually a system rather than a word: the substitute is required and the plain word carries a cost. Nazi Germany's language rules (Sprachregelungen) governed how the deportation and murder of Europe's Jews could be written about; the Soviet state classed peasants deported during collectivisation as "special settlers", a category Lynne Viola has traced through the archives; Russia's media regulator told outlets in 2022 not to say "attack" or "invasion". Where a government cannot compel vocabulary, the term is fixed by repetition, by legal documents and by news organisations that adopt it as neutral, and the contest moves into style guides.

The device works on the people doing the act as well as on the public. Hannah Arendt argued that the Nazi language rules helped officials avoid equating their work with their ordinary knowledge of murder. The same mechanics appear at lower stakes in business ("downsizing"; William Lutz's 1989 book takes its title from "revenue enhancement" for a tax increase) and on both sides of armed conflicts: Palestinian armed groups called suicide bombings of civilians "martyrdom operations", a term Human Rights Watch examined in its 2002 report on those attacks, while Israeli officials call the policy of killing named militants sikul memukad ("targeted prevention"), the policy the Israeli Supreme Court reviewed in its 2006 judgment.

Why Euphemism / doublespeak propaganda works

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman's work on framing effects (1981) showed that logically equivalent descriptions ("200 people will be saved" against "400 people will die") lead to different choices; a euphemism is a framing choice made in one word. The plain word carries more physical emotion: Jeffrey Bowers and Christopher Pleydell-Pearce (2011) found stronger skin-conductance responses when people read aloud offensive words than when they read euphemisms for the same things. And a phrase such as "special treatment" gives the reader nothing to picture.

Illustration: a map table with pins and red string across an unnamed region.
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Albert Bandura's research on moral disengagement (1999) lists "euphemistic labeling" among the mechanisms, alongside moral justification and dehumanisation, by which people switch off the self-sanctions that normally restrain harm. Substitutes wear out as they absorb the meaning of what they name, which Steven Pinker called the "euphemism treadmill" (1994).

Newspeak and doublespeak

The two words are often used as one, but they name different things. Newspeak is invented. In the appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four ("The Principles of Newspeak"), Orwell describes a language that the ruling party of Oceania is building to shrink vocabulary until certain thoughts cannot be put into words. It is fiction, and no state has made its language work that way. Orwell's own account of real language is the 1946 essay: stock phrases and vague words let a speaker avoid a concrete picture, and "political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible". Doublespeak is a later label for the real-world practice, and it does not appear in the novel; it draws on Orwell's Newspeak and "doublethink" (holding two contradictory beliefs at once). The strong form of Orwell's idea, that removing a word removes the thought, is not supported by linguistic research; the weaker effect that wording shifts judgment is documented as framing (see above).

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William Lutz, an English professor who led the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Committee on Public Doublespeak, defined doublespeak as language that pretends to communicate but does not, and in Doublespeak (1989) sorted it into euphemism, jargon, gobbledygook and inflated language. Euphemism is therefore one kind of doublespeak, not a synonym for it. The NCTE gave a Doublespeak Award from 1974 until it discontinued the award in 2022, planning to replace it with a yearly review, The Year in Doublespeak. Its recipients have included, by year:

  • 1975, Yasser Arafat, the award's only non-US recipient, for his statements on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
  • 1979, the nuclear power industry, for "energetic disassembly" (an explosion) and "rapid oxidation" (a fire) in describing Three Mile Island.
  • 1984, the US State Department, for "unlawful or arbitrary deprivation of life" in place of "killing" in its human rights reports.
  • 1989, Exxon, for calling oil-covered Alaskan shoreline "environmentally clean" and later "treated".
  • 1991, the US Department of Defense, for Gulf War bombing described as "efforts" and warplanes as "weapons systems".
  • 1997, President Clinton, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and Speaker Newt Gingrich, for describing a budget deal.
  • 2004, the Bush administration, for terms used for abuse at Abu Ghraib.
  • 2013, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, for a "school utilization" formula used to select schools for closure.

The list shows who the committee was watching, not who uses the device most: nearly all recipients are US officials, parties or firms, because the committee was an American teachers' body writing about American public language; its only non-US recipient was named in 1975. The same device is documented elsewhere in this page's examples. (NCTE, Doublespeak Award announcements, 1974-2020; Lutz, 1989; Orwell, 1946 and 1949.)

Euphemism / doublespeak propaganda examples across eras and sides

  • Nazi language rules (1941-1945, German-occupied Europe, Nazi Germany). German documents used "Endlösung der Judenfrage" (final solution of the Jewish question), "Evakuierung" (evacuation) and "Aussiedlung" (resettlement) for deportation to killing sites, and "Sonderbehandlung" (special treatment) for killing. The Wannsee Conference protocol of January 1942 speaks of evacuating Jews to the East (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961; Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963).
  • Military "comfort stations" (1930s-1945, East and Southeast Asia, Imperial Japan). The military's terms "ianjo" (comfort station) and "ianfu" (comfort women) named a system in which women from Korea, China, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies and elsewhere were held for sexual use by soldiers. Japan's 1993 Kono Statement acknowledged the military's direct or indirect involvement; the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, said in 1996 that "military sexual slavery" was more accurate (Kono Statement, 1993; Coomaraswamy, UN Commission on Human Rights, 1996; Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Comfort Women, 2000).
  • "Evacuation" and "non-aliens" (1942, US West Coast, US Army). Covered in 'Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry' (exclusion order posted in San Francisco). Exclusion orders called forced removal "evacuation", US citizens "non-aliens" and the racetracks where families were held "assembly centers". The federal Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians found the policy driven by "race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership" (CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied, 1982-83).
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  • The "events" in Algeria (1954-1962, Algeria and France, French Republic). French governments called the war of independence "operations to maintain order" and "the events in Algeria", and counter-insurgency "pacification". A 1999 law replaced the official phrase "operations carried out in North Africa" with "the Algerian War" (French law of 18 October 1999; Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l'oubli, 1991).
  • "Incursion" and "air support" (1970-1974, Cambodia, US government). In April 1970 President Nixon said "This is not an invasion of Cambodia", and officials called the operation an "incursion". In 1974 the National Council of Teachers of English gave its first Doublespeak Award to Col. David Opfer, a US Air Force press officer, for telling reporters the bombing of Cambodia was not bombing but "air support" (William Lutz, Doublespeak, 1989).
  • "Enhanced interrogation techniques" (2002-2014, United States, CIA). CIA and Justice Department documents used the phrase for methods including waterboarding and sleep deprivation. The Senate Intelligence Committee study (executive summary, 2014) concluded that the techniques were not effective and that the interrogations were "brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others"; the CIA's 2013 response disputed that, and Bush administration officials have said the program was lawful. In 2014 President Obama said "we tortured some folks", and the New York Times adopted "torture" for such techniques (SSCI, 2014; CIA response, 2013).
  • "Vocational education and training centers" (from 2017, Xinjiang, China). China's government describes facilities in Xinjiang as vocational training centers for counter-terrorism and de-radicalisation. The UN human rights office's 2022 assessment found arbitrary deprivation of liberty, called allegations of torture or ill-treatment credible and said violations may constitute crimes against humanity; China rejected it (State Council Information Office white paper, 2019; OHCHR assessment, 2022).

  • "Special military operation" (2022, Russia and Ukraine, Russian Federation). Covered in Address announcing a 'special military operation'. The 24 February 2022 address used the operation label in place of the word war. Two days later Roskomnadzor told outlets to remove words such as "attack", "invasion" and "declaration of war", and a law signed on 4 March made "discrediting" the armed forces a criminal offence (kremlin.ru, 24 February 2022).

  • "Joining" in place of annexation (1910, Korea, Empire of Japan). The Emperor Meiji's rescript of 29 August 1910, printed in Korean translation in the first Official Gazette of the Government-General, grounds the end of the Korean state in "the peace of the East" and "the welfare of the people" and names the act with the word heigō (倂合, "joining" or "merging"), which English-language sources render as annexation. See 詔書 (Imperial Rescript on the Annexation of Korea), Korean translation, Official Gazette of the Government-General of Korea no. 1, p. 17 (Official Gazette of the Government-General of Korea, 1910).

  • "Police actions" (1947 and 1948-1949, Indonesia, Netherlands). The Dutch government called its two large offensives against the Indonesian Republic politionele acties. A Polygoon newsreel of December 1948, 'Politiele actie in Indonesie hervat' (Polygoon newsreel, chalkboard bulletin), carries the bulletin "Police action in Indonesia resumed" for the second offensive, launched on 19 December 1948. The 2022 Dutch research programme Independence, Decolonisation, Violence and War in Indonesia, 1945-1950 concluded that Dutch forces used extreme violence on a structural basis, and it also documented violence by Indonesian groups (Polygoon Hollands Nieuws, week 52, 1948, via Open Beelden; NIOD, KITLV and NIMH, 2022).
  • "Border-securing measures" (1961, East Germany, SED government). The agency caption to a photograph of the Leipzig extra edition of 13 August 1961, Leipziger Volkszeitung extra on the border-securing measures, handed out in Leipzig, calls the closing of the border to West Berlin "Grenzsicherungsmaßnahmen". The barrier was later officially the "antifaschistischer Schutzwall" (anti-fascist protection wall); the Berlin Wall Foundation and the Potsdam Centre for Contemporary History have documented at least 140 deaths at the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989 (136 in the 2009 edition) (Bundesarchiv Bild 183-83561-0001; Hertle and Nooke, 2009).
  • "Defense of socialist gains" (1968, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact). In a TASS announcement of 22 August 1968, TASS International Service, 'Occupation Progress', broadcast (Moscow, August 22, 1968; FBIS transcript), the troops that entered Czechoslovakia on the night of 20-21 August are "allied" and their entry is "measures taken in defense of socialist gains". The Czechoslovak National Assembly's declaration of 21 August called the occupation a violation of international law. Both texts were monitored and transcribed by the US Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS Daily Report, 22 August 1968).
  • "Neutralize" (1985, Nicaragua, CIA). 'Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare' (CIA Contra training manual, Nicaragua, p. 33, 1980s) is a page from a psychological-operations manual for Contra fighters, in the CIA's English translation, advising that selected officials be "neutralized" before an assembled population. A footnote on the page records that the English lesson plans said "remove". The NCTE gave its 1985 Doublespeak Award to the CIA for the manual. The page is shown as printed, and no view is taken here on how the wording arose (CIA Reading Room document C02194646; NCTE, 1985).
  • "Unlawful or arbitrary deprivation of life" (1984, United States, State Department). The phrase replaced "killing" in the department's country human rights reports, and the NCTE gave it the 1984 Doublespeak Award (NCTE, 1984).

Frame from a Dutch newsreel with chalkboard bulletins headed "Politionele actie in Indonesie hervat"

Opening text card of the 1943 Office of War Information film Japanese Relocation

FBIS monitor page of a TASS announcement of 22 August 1968

Russian Ministry of Defence poster reading "Liquidation of the threat" over a Su-35 fighter

Official Gazette of the Government-General of Korea, page 17, 1910

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Polygoon Hollands Nieuws, week 52 (Netherlands, December 1948), newsreel frame: bulletins read "Police action in Indonesia resumed" for the second Dutch offensive against the Indonesian Republic. Open Beelden, Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid. Public Domain Mark.

Opening card of Japanese Relocation (US Office of War Information, 1943): "it became necessary to transfer several thousand Japanese residents from the Pacific Coast to points in the American Interior". About 120,000 people, most of them US citizens, were removed under Executive Order 9066. Internet Archive. Public domain (US government work).

FBIS monitor page of a TASS English-language announcement from Moscow, 22 August 1968, calling the Warsaw Pact troops "allied" and the invasion "measures taken in defense of socialist gains". Foreign Broadcast Information Service (CIA), copy held by the LBJ Library, via Internet Archive. Public domain (CC0).

Russian Ministry of Defence "agitation poster", 2022: "Liquidation of the threat" over a Su-35. The noun phrase names no target, act or casualty. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0 per the ministry's terms of use. Shown as a documentary record, not endorsement.

Page 17 of the first Official Gazette of the Government-General of Korea (1910) with the Meiji rescript of 29 August 1910 using the word heigō ("joining") for annexation.

How to spot Euphemism / doublespeak propaganda

  • Can you restate the phrase with a subject and a concrete verb: who did what to whom?
  • If you substitute the plain word (kill, bomb, deport, detain, fire), does the sentence become false, or only harder to hear?
  • Does the phrase name the act, or the purpose claimed for it ("pacification", "education", "security")?
  • Is the term defined, and does the definition name the physical act?
  • Is the vocabulary enforced, with the plain word discouraged or punished?
  • How do courts, historians, international bodies and the other side describe the same event?

Where Euphemism / doublespeak propaganda ends: edge cases and legitimate persuasion

5 items · Tact is not doublespeak. "Passed away" in a condolence note hides nothing from anyone who…
  • Tact is not doublespeak. "Passed away" in a condolence note hides nothing from anyone who has to judge an act. The technique begins when the soft word stands between the public and an evaluation it is entitled to make.
  • Defined terms of art are not euphemism. Legal and technical vocabulary is precise within its field; it becomes a problem when used on a general audience in place of the plain description (see The Justice Department's FARA release and public demonstrations, where statutory wording sits beside a prison term).
  • The mirror image is dysphemism. Inflating a neutral act with an ugly word belongs with Name-calling: Frank Luntz, in Words That Work (2007), describes advising Republicans to say "death tax" for the estate tax; opponents of Florida's 2022 Parental Rights in Education Act, including Democratic officials, named it the "Don't Say Gay" bill, a phrase that does not appear in its text. A warm name for one's own side overlaps with Glittering generalities: "Peacekeeper", the Reagan administration's name for the MX missile, or the Inflation Reduction Act (2022), whose effect on inflation the Congressional Budget Office estimated as negligible in the near term.
  • Contested words, contested facts. Sometimes the word is the dispute, as with "illegal immigrant" against "undocumented immigrant" (the Associated Press stopped using "illegal immigrant" in 2013). Each side calls the other's word the distortion; honest practice describes the act plainly and attributes each label. This differs from cases such as "enhanced interrogation" above, where an official inquiry has described the act itself.
  • Neighbours and the line. Semantic hijacking bends a word that already carries weight ("denazification"); euphemism substitutes a bland one. Disclosure theater hides who is speaking; euphemism hides what is described. Legitimate persuasion names the act and then argues for it.

Sources and further reading

Sources

26 items · George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language", Horizon , 1946.
  • George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language", Horizon, 1946.
  • William Lutz, Doublespeak: From "Revenue Enhancement" to "Terminal Living", Harper & Row, 1989.
  • National Council of Teachers of English, Committee on Public Doublespeak, Doublespeak Award (from 1974).
  • Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Quadrangle Books, 1961.
  • Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Viking, 1963.
  • Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements, Oxford University Press, 2007.
  • Government of Japan, Statement by Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono, 1993.
  • Radhika Coomaraswamy, Report of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women (E/CN.4/1996/53/Add.1), UN Commission on Human Rights, 1996.
  • Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II, Columbia University Press, 2000.
  • Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982-83.
  • Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l'oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d'Algérie, La Découverte, 1991.
  • Hans-Hermann Hertle and Maria Nooke, eds., Die Todesopfer an der Berliner Mauer 1961-1989, Ch. Links, 2009.
  • NIOD, KITLV and NIMH, Independence, Decolonisation, Violence and War in Indonesia, 1945-1950, research programme, 2022.
  • Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, 22 August 1968 (TASS), via Internet Archive; CIA Reading Room document C02194646.
  • Official Gazette of the Government-General of Korea, 1910.
  • Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program (executive summary), 2014; CIA, comments on the study, 2013.
  • State Council Information Office of the People's Republic of China, Vocational Education and Training in Xinjiang, 2019.
  • Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, 2022.
  • Human Rights Watch, Erased in a Moment: Suicide Bombing Attacks Against Israeli Civilians, 2002.
  • Supreme Court of Israel, Public Committee Against Torture in Israel v. Government of Israel, HCJ 769/02, 2006.
  • Congressional Budget Office, estimate of the budgetary effects and inflation effects of the Inflation Reduction Act, August 2022.
  • Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, "The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice", Science, 1981.
  • Jeffrey S. Bowers and Christopher W. Pleydell-Pearce, "Swearing, Euphemisms, and Linguistic Relativity", PLoS ONE, 2011.
  • Albert Bandura, "Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities", Personality and Social Psychology Review, 1999.
  • Steven Pinker, "The Game of the Name", New York Times, 1994.
  • Frank Luntz, Words That Work, Hyperion, 2007.

Case studies

77 items · The Justice Department's FARA release and public demonstrations — The Justice…

Euphemism / doublespeak propaganda examples in the collection

All 32 euphemism / doublespeak examples
詔書 (Imperial Rescript on the Annexation of Korea), Korean translation, Official Gazette of the Government-General of Korea no. 1, p. 17Empire of Japan詔書 (Imperial Rescript on the Annexation of Korea), Korean translation, Official Gazette of the Government-General of Korea no. 1, p. 17Aug 29, 1910 · Glittering generalities, Euphemism / doublespeakContent noteSigns of SpringUnited StatesSigns of SpringMar 11, 1928 · Euphemism / doublespeakWhat to Do if National Insurance Cards or Books are Destroyed in an Air RaidUnited KingdomWhat to Do if National Insurance Cards or Books are Destroyed in an Air Raid1942 · Euphemism / doublespeak"I'm conserving wool, this bathing suit's painted on." (undated, c. 1942-1945, OWI)United States"I'm conserving wool, this bathing suit's painted on." (undated, c. 1942-1945, OWI)1943 · Euphemism / doublespeak'Politiele actie in Indonesie hervat' (Polygoon newsreel, chalkboard bulletin)Netherlands'Politiele actie in Indonesie hervat' (Polygoon newsreel, chalkboard bulletin)Dec 1948 · Euphemism / doublespeakContent noteReady Power for Peace, 7th Fleet poster (English poster distributed in Manila)United StatesReady Power for Peace, 7th Fleet poster (English poster distributed in Manila)May 21, 1964 · Euphemism / doublespeak, TransferTASS International Service, 'Occupation Progress', broadcast (Moscow, 1968-08-22; FBIS transcript)Soviet UnionTASS International Service, 'Occupation Progress', broadcast (Moscow, August 22, 1968; FBIS transcript)Aug 22, 1968 · Name-calling, Bandwagon, Euphemism / doublespeak"Ihr Tod ist uns Verpflichtung": Pioneers at the border-troops memorial, BerlinEast Germany"Ihr Tod ist uns Verpflichtung": Pioneers at the border-troops memorial, BerlinAug 13, 1986 · Euphemism / doublespeak, Transfer

Euphemism / doublespeak in the watch briefs

All 13 briefs

Propaganda techniques related to Euphemism / doublespeak

Semantic hijackingGlittering generalitiesDisclosure theaterDehumanizationDog whistleLoaded languageGaslighting

Related guides and pages