by Ross Petras
Yogi Berra, in The Sporting News, discussing the sayings he has become famous for
On Quotes:
Don’t quote what he says. Say what he means!
campaign aide for Senator Barry Goldwater, then making a bid for the ’64 presidency, to reporters
R
On Race Relations:
Sure, I look like a white man. But my heart is as black as anyone’s here.
George Wallace, Alabama governor and then presidential candidate, during a campaign speech to a largely black audience
On Race Relations:
Why would we have different races if God meant us to be alike and associate with each other?
Lester Maddox, former governor of Georgia
On Radioactive Leaks, the Nonnews-Worthiness of:
The thing is this—we have incidents happening here all the time.
Department of Energy spokesman at Hanford, Washington, on why no announcement was made on a leak of radioactive material
On Rape:
I say this a lot, and I probably shouldn’t: the difference between rape and seduction is salesmanship.
Bill Carpenter, mayor of Independence, Missouri
On Rats:
I smell a rat, I see him floating in the air, but mark me, I shall nip him in the bud.
Sir Boyle Roche, eighteenth-century Member of Parliament from Tralee and famous word mangier
On Reading the Crowd:
They made an animal-type grunting sound when the National Guard was mentioned. There were some good-natured grunts. Let me admit theoretically that some people hissed.
David Beckwith, press secretary to Vice-President Dan Quayle, commenting on rumors that West Point cadets hissed at Quayle
On Ronald Reagan, Empathy of:
If I listened to him [Michael Dukakis] long enough I would be convinced that we’re in an economic downturn and people are homeless and going without food and medical attention and that we’ve got to do something about the unemployed.
President Ronald Reagan, during the presidential campaign, talking about Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis’s criticism of the Administration
On Ronald Reagan, Sense of Humor of:
My fellow Americans. I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.
President Ronald Reagan, before he was going to make a radio broadcast, unaware that the mike was already on
On Rebukes:
Sir, you have tasted two whole worms; you have hissed all my mystery lectures and been caught fighting a liar in the quad, you will leave Oxford by the next town drain.
Rev. William A. Spooner telling a student to leave his class for nonattendance and lighting fires; his classic spoonerism
On the Recession, Where to Find:
The recession has been in the back of my mind, but I’ve seen no sign of it whatsoever.
Auntie Pasta executive interviewed in Gourmet News, April 1991
On Record Executives, Great Decisions of:
You’ll never make it—four groups are out. Go back to Liverpool….
Decca Records executive to the Beatles in 1962
On Red Lights, Meaning of:
He can run any time he wants. I’m giving him the red light.
Yogi Berra, talking about new Yankee Rickey Henderson, known for his base-stealing ability
On Redundancy:
I’m for abolishing and doing away with redundancy.
J. Curtis McKay of the Wisconsin State Elections Board
On Reform, Political:
We must restore to Chicago all the good things it never had.
Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago
On Reform, Teamsters and:
To those who say it is time to reform this organization and that it’s time the officers stopped selling out its members, I say “Go to hell.”
Frank Fitzsimmons, Teamsters Union president
On Relatives:
This extraordinary man left no children behind him, except his brother, who was killed at the same time.
from a biography of French revolutionary leader Robespierre, in a nineteenth-century Irish paper
On Relatives:
Are you any relation to your brother Marv?
Leon Wood, New Jersey Nets guard, to Steve Albert, Nets TV commentator
On Relatives:
My dear Sandby. I’m glad to see you. Pray is it you or your brother?
Sir W. Caulfield, British literary figure, greeting a friend
On Religion, Newspapers and:
It isn’t like I came down from Mount Sinai with the tabloids.
Indianapolis Colts coach Ron Meyer
On Religion and Sports:
If Jesus were a football player, he’d play fair, he’d play clean, and he’d put the guy across the line on his butt.
Barry Rice, football player for evangelist Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University
On Religion and Sports:
If Christ were a ballplayer, he’d be the best there was. He’d take out the guy at second base, then he’d say, “I love you,” pick him up, slap him on the butt and come back to the dugout.
Brett Butler, Los Angeles Dodger
On Religion and Sports:
I can’t perceive God being on the mound in the ninth inning and saying [a loss] is the way it should be. I perceive Him as being an individual who would beat you any way He can as long as it’s within the rules.
Dick Balderson, general manager of the Seattle Mariners
On Religion and Sports:
If Jesus were on the field, he’d be pitching inside and breaking up double plays. He’d be high-fiving the other guys.
Tim Burke, Montreal Expos pitcher
On Repeating Yourself:
I have reiterated over again what I have said before.
Mayor Robert F. Wagner of New York
On Reputations:
His reputation preceded him before he got here.
Don Mattingly, New York Yankee, on Mets pitcher Dwight Gooden
On Retreat, Other Words for:
Should the Red hordes continue to pour across the Yalu, it might not only render impossible the resumption of our offensive, but conceivably could eventuate in a movement in retrograde.
General Douglas MacArthur in a press conference, commenting on the situation in Korea
On Revolutions, What to Do in:
I would take my own head by the hair, cut it off, and presenting it to the despot, would say to him, “Tyrant, behold the act of a free man.”
a perhaps overzealous French revolutionary speaking to mob in Paris in 1789, reported by Anglo-American revolutionary Thomas Paine
On the Rhythm Method According to Experts:
… the safe times [for sex] are the week before and the week of ovulation.
Dr. Ruth Westheimer, in First Love: A Young People’s Guide to Sexual Information. The typo (“safe” for “unsafe”) resulted in a huge book recall and the issuance of a new, corrected edition.
On Riding:
Now ride off in all directions.
Michael Curtiz, directing Gary Cooper on a horse
On Being Right:
You are partly one hundred percent right.
movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn
On Riots, Interesting Ways to Control:
… airplanes may be used for the purpose of keeping rioters off roofs by means of machine gun fire … infantry should and will invariably constitute the major part of any command employed in suppressing domestic disorders … armored cars will be especially valuable in riot duty….
General Douglas MacArthur, Military Aid in Disturbances (1935), in which he also comes out against the use of blanks, as an “admission of weakness.” Shoot to kill, he urged. From George Seldes, famous muckraking journalist of the era.
On Roles, Acting:
It’s a great role and you’ll play it to the tilt.
Gregory Ratoff, Hollywood director
On Fran
klin Roosevelt, Comparisons with:
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.
Howard Cosell, sports broadcaster
On Franklin Roosevelt, Dubious Comparisons with:
I’m not trying to compare myself with Roosevelt, but he couldn’t walk either.
George Wallace, campaigning in the 1976 presidential race
On Ropes:
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.
overheard during congressional debate
On Rotarians, Reasons Not to Join the:
At the Lincoln Park traps on Sunday … over 80 shooters took part in the program. Rotarians, Be patriotic! Learn to shoot yourself.
from Chicago Rotary Club journal, Gyrator
On Rules, Strange:
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.
from rules for a West Point contest printed in a local newspaper
On Running:
I’m very sorry, but I ran like a fire hydrant.
Michael Curtiz, Hollywood director, apologizing for being late to an appointment
On Russian Spies, Statements Made When Discovered:
In all other respects, he’s done a very good job.
Press Officer Noel Jones, of the British Embassy in Moscow, commenting on Konstantin Demakhin, embassy driver for nineteen years, who, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, announced that he had been a KGB spy
SPECIAL SECTION:
Academese and Bureaucratese
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.
Some Examples:
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).
