Originally Posted by
oldmako
I disagree with Gallup as its a false pretense. National Right to Work campaigns are foisted up as just one eyelash shy God and Apple Pie. They are very creatively written, particularly once they appear on the ballot which makes them look harmless and beneficial. When I read the ballot in my home state last year, I had to read it twice, that's how carefully worded it was. Only a crooked attorney could come up with something so sleazy and deceptive. In fact they are there to simply to destroy unions, lower wages, give worker bees less career options, retirement choices etc, etc, etc. I submit that if more people who polled as supporting NRTW laws actually knew more about them, that number would easily drop by a third, if not more. Further, I'd bet cash that at least a third could not tell you accurately what the damn thing meant five minutes after they left the polling booth.
"Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g., "downsizing" for layoffs, "servicing the target" for bombing), in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable. It may also refer to intentional ambiguity in language or to actual inversions of meaning. In such cases, doublespeak disguises the nature of the truth. Doublespeak is most closely associated with political language.
Origins and concept
The term "doublespeak" probably has its roots in George Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although the term is not used in the book, it is a close relative of two of the book's central concepts, "doublethink" and "Newspeak". Another variant, "doubletalk", also referring to deliberately ambiguous speech, did exist at the time Orwell wrote his book, but the usage of "doublespeak" as well as of "doubletalk" in the sense emphasizing ambiguity clearly postdates the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Parallels have also been drawn between doublespeak and Orwell's classic essay Politics and the English Language, which discusses the distortion of language for political purposes."