Beard - Spinglish

D o you speak Spinglish? Well, if you speak English, chances are youve been using Spinglish for a long time, most likely without even knowing it. For example, have you ever overslept and missed a meeting and blamed your absence on a scheduling error? Tried to weasel out of a parking ticket because of an alleged meter malfunction? Explained that a bounced check was merely the result of an unanticipated negative cash-balance accounting issue?

Or, when you noticed that your hospital had billed you for a disposable mucus recovery system, did you figure out they were charging you fifteen bucks for a box of Kleenex? Are you aware that whenever companies say for your convenience, they actually mean for our convenience?

If you answered yes to even one of these questions, youre already on the road to mastering the devious vocabulary of verbal distortion, and with our indispensable bilingual dictionary as your guide, odds are youll soon be earning your B.S. in B.S.or, better still, a coveted Spin Doctorate. And even if youre a rank beginner, dont despair: Spinglish: The Definitive Dictionary of Deliberately Deceptive Language is virtually guaranteed to teach you how to succeed in business, politicsand everything elsewithout really lying!

But what precisely is Spinglish? Well, in spite of its polyglot-sounding name, it isnt some foreign language. Its just our native tongue, transformed into a sophisticated method of judicious miscommunication through the use of careful word choice and the artful rephrasing and reframing of familiar terms. To put it another way (which, of course, is what Spinglish is designed to do), it all comes down to making me sound better, or you sound worse, or both. Im a freedom fighter, youre a terrorist. I want to enhance revenues, you want to raise taxes. My product is artisanal, all-natural, and organic; yours is mass-produced, synthetic, and contains artificial additives.

Needless to say, any language can be used to convey or conceal all sorts of meanings and messages, but English is unparalleled in its capacity for creative misdirection, thanks to a couple of unique linguistic features. First, with over a million words, it has the largest vocabulary of any language in the world, and with more than a billion speakers, it is the most widely spoken.

And second, English basically consists of two completely separate and complementary sub-languages: Latin, from the Romans who conquered England and bequeathed us mostly polysyllabic (and often nicely evasive) formulations like exterminate and circumlocution, and the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Nordic, and Germanic vernaculars of our barbarian ancestors on the wrong end of the catapult who gave us short, simple, cut-to-the-chase words like kill and bullshit.

Of course, using language to control a narrative is nothing new. Long before George Orwell wrote 1984, our nation coined Orwellian terms like Manifest Destiny to rationalize a transcontinental land grab, Indian reservations to refer to forced relocation sites for Native Americans, and Benevolent Assimilation to describe the violent seizure of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, to name just a few.

Its also important to distinguish between slang and jargon, which are spontaneously generated, and loaded language and weasel words, which are premeditated. Saying that a bunch of people who were fired were given the boot or that someone who died kicked the bucket is just colorful; describing mass layoffs with euphemisms like downsizing or rightsizing, or a death due to malpractice as a negative patient care outcome, is deliberately deceptive.

The fact is, not only has Spinglish been around for a long time, its everywhere: on Wall Street and Madison Avenue, inside the Beltway, in Silicon Valley and Hollywood, in the fields of Law, Medicine, the Artsyou name it, and if you can name it, someone can rename it to make it sound a whole lot better and promote it with a flurry of press releases flogged by a host of professional Spinocchios and hundreds of highly paid liars with fireproof pants ready to pull the genuine imitation faux wool over your eyes.

But now, thanks to this shoot-from-the-lip glossary of time-tested, tried-and-untrue terminology, you, too, can have just the right self-serving phrase at the tip of your forked tongue, and no matter how embarrassing the situation or awkward the silence, youll never be at a loss for misleading words again!

So apply some Sock-Puppet News-Job nose-growth-control cream, shown to be of significant value in limiting topical, prevarication-related nasal lengthening (your results may vary), put on that pair of Poppy-Khaki brand combustion-resistant trousers (certified 100% effective when worn with approved carbon-fiber undergarments), and issue a statement, run an ad, or just offer a simple explanation that tells it like it isnt, it wasnt, and it couldnt ever have been.

a

.]

.]

.