When American forces killed civilians during the 1991 Gulf War, the briefings called it collateral damage. Asked directly whether this meant civilian deaths, General Bernard Rogers confirmed that it did.
William Lutz, an English professor at Rutgers who chaired the National Council of Teachers of English committee on public doublespeak for years and ran its annual Doublespeak Award, spent a career collecting these. His definition is precise: doublespeak is language that pretends to communicate but does not, that makes the bad seem good, the negative appear positive, and the unpleasant appear attractive or at least tolerable. It is not a failure of clarity. It is a deliberate construction that avoids or shifts responsibility, and whose incongruity between what is said and what is meant is intentional.
The catalogue is grimly consistent across domains. Enhanced interrogation for torture. Extraordinary rendition for kidnapping. Downsizing, rightsizing, workforce optimization, involuntary separation for firing people. Revenue enhancement for taxation. Negative patient care outcome for a death. Service interruption for a failure. Pre-owned for second-hand, which is harmless, and pacification for the destruction of villages, which is not.
The mechanism is well established in psychology. Concrete, imageable language activates sensory and affective processing; abstract, Latinate language does not, or does so much more weakly. A phrase that generates no mental picture generates no emotional response, and the emotional response is the thing being suppressed. Civilian deaths produces an image with a person in it. Collateral damage produces nothing at all — it is two abstract nouns, one of which is an accounting term.
Albert Bandura placed this within his theory of moral disengagement, and named it directly: euphemistic labelling is one of eight mechanisms by which people commit harmful acts without the self-sanction that would ordinarily prevent them. Bandura's experimental work found that people behaved more punitively toward others when the action was described in sanitized terms.
The crucial point is that this operates on the speaker as much as the audience. This is not a message crafted by cynics to fool the public while they themselves see clearly. Bureaucracies adopt euphemism spontaneously, and its first function is internal: it permits the people carrying out an action to continue carrying it out. Which is why the vocabulary appears in internal documents that were never meant to be read outside, and why it is so consistent across organizations that have no contact with each other.
The next chapter's subject is the same mechanism applied by a regime whose internal documents we have.
The countermeasure is translation, performed in writing, before responding. Take the sentence and rewrite it with concrete nouns, active verbs, and a named agent. We conducted a workforce optimization becomes we fired four hundred people. There were negative patient care outcomes becomes two patients died. The operation resulted in collateral damage becomes we killed some civilians.
Then read both versions and notice the size of the difference. That difference is the exact quantity of moral response the original sentence was engineered to prevent, and it is a measurement of what the writer thought needed hiding.
Cross-ref: Nazi euphemism chapter