A field guide to the species of political language, with notes on habitat and abundance
Most political language isn't written to deceive. It's grown. A sentence goes through a press secretary, an adviser, a legal check and a minister's office, and at every stage something gets added to soften it and nothing gets taken out. What comes out the other end has a shape you can recognise, and once you've seen it a few times you can't stop seeing it.
So I catalogued them. Each entry has the field marks you identify it by, a note on what it's doing, how common it is across the whole corpus, and real specimens with dates and links so you can check I'm not making it up.
The categories come from William Lutz, who sorted doublespeak into euphemism, jargon, gobbledygook and inflated language, and from the discourse people who named agent deletion. Abundance is just the share of releases where the species turns up at least once.
Three species are listed but not recorded. Nothing was found in 47,921 releases. That absence is the most interesting thing in here, and it's at the end.
Paste any writing below, yours or someone else's, and it'll tell you which species are in there. It only counts. It doesn't judge. The count is usually enough.