From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!uwvax!doug Newsgroups: net.jokes Title: Al Haig vs. English Article-I.D.: uwvax.456 Posted: Wed Jun 30 19:52:41 1982 Received: Thu Jul 1 06:26:49 1982 from NEWSWEEK July 5, 1982 p.24 "Why Haig Quit: Contexting It" Early on, Alexander Haig's persistent verbification of nouns, expropriation of compound military-bureaucratic voguisms and caveating of almost everything back-burnered the rest of his style. Such obfuscatory phrase-turns as "posthostage-return-attitude," or "nuance-al differences" and the still elusive "epistemologicallywise" eyebrow raised U.S. and allied officials alike who could not figure out what the Secretary was elocuting. Pundits mercilessly characterized Haigspeak as "Haigledygook" and "Haigravation." Informationed Haigally that a question could not be answered "the way you contexed it," Sen. John Glenn of Ohio gamely comebacked, "Will you burden share?" And even the normally support-providing Wall Street Journal bluntly derisioned, "What language is the Secretary speaking?" Soon, diplomatic nuanceniks premised that Haig was on-purposely phrasing his pronouncements camouflagedly, to confound Soviet translators, or perhaps having masterminded a brilliant new anti-leak speak. But Haig himself cold-watered that notion when, asked to clarify a statement, he press conferenced, "That was consciously ambiguous in the sense that any terrorist government..., I think, knows clearly what we are speaking of." But last year Haig's semantic sabotage mysteriously plateaued out. Perhaps he was fed up with all the linguistic pot-shot taking, or perhaps he conceptualized that his personal verbification program had downscended into the hopeless-cause mode.