When is a Stultifying Speaking Style Helpful?

When you are delivering bad or - at best - ambiguous news to a powerful audience in a high-stakes situation, does it pay to “ah” and “um”?

Could it actually be beneficial to speak in an obfuscating fashion when you seek to:

1. Sidestep controversy?
   
2. Avoid being frequently-quoted?
   
3. Mitigate the impact of sometimes hostile questioning?
   
4. Prevent an “audience” from taking decisive action?

I am referring to the recent (not past) testimony on the hill by Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General Petraeus. It is difficult to be on the hot seat. Jargon and doublespeak are, too often, the norm in politics and in academic and corporate life.

Can it actually be smart to speak so that people do not understand what you mean and get tired of trying?

Even and especially in dire and/or controversial circumstances and with the four “avoidance” goals listed above, I’ll bet most communication experts would advise straight talk.

With his blunt and humorous response in The New York Times, Dick Cavett has stirred excellent commentary from Bert Decker and others. Bet Bob Sutton, Mark Halperin, Arch Lustberg, Peggy Noonan, David Brooks, and Dan and Chip Heath would concur.

For one thing, not speaking clearly and compellingly means your opponents' comments may become even more memorable in contrast. Rep. Ackerman noted, for example, that Petraeus was “pushing rocks uphill.”

Wrote Cavett, in part, "As speakers, both Petraeus and Crocker are guilty of unbearable sesquipedalianism, a word wickedly inflicted on me by my English-teaching mother. It’s one of those words that is what it says. From the Latin, literally “using foot-and-a-half-long words.” ...

Never in this breathing world have I seen a person clog up and erode his speaking — as distinct from his reading — with more “uhs,” “ers” and “ums” than poor Crocker. Surely he has never seen himself talking: “Uh, that is uh, a, uh, matter that we, er, um, uh are carefully, uh, considering.” (Not a parody, an actual Crocker sentence. And not even the worst.)

These harsh-on-the-ear insertions, delivered in his less than melodious, hoarse-sounding tenor, are maddening. And their effect is to say that the speaker is painfully unsure of what he wants, er, um, to say.

If Crocker’s collection of these broken shards of verbal crockery were eliminated from his testimony, everyone there would get home at least an hour earlier.

Petraeus commits a different assault on the listener. And on the language. In addition to his own pedantic delivery, there is his turgid vocabulary. It reminds you of Copspeak, a language spoken nowhere on earth except by cops and firemen when talking to “Eyewitness News.”

Its rule: never use a short word where a longer one will do. It must be meant to convey some misguided sense of “learnedness” and “scholasticism” — possibly even that dread thing, “intellectualism” — to their talk. Sorry, I mean their “articulation.”

No crook ever gets out of the car. A “perpetrator exits the vehicle.” (Does any cop say to his wife at dinner, “Honey, I stubbed my toe today as I exited our vehicle”?) No “man” or “woman” is present in Copspeak. They are replaced by that five-syllable, leaden ingot, the “individual.” The other day, there issued from a fire chief’s mouth, “It contributed to the obfuscation of what eventually eventuated.” This from a guy who looked like he talked, in real life, like Rocky Balboa. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Who imposes this phony, academic-sounding verbal junk on brave and hard-working men and women who don’t need the added burden of trying to talk like effete characters from Victorian novels?

And, General, there is no excuse anywhere on earth for a stillborn monster like “ethnosectarian conflict,” as Jon Stewart so hilariously pointed out.