GUEST COLUMNIST: A quick guide to PennSpeak

Relax. It's not your fault. You see, the statements and quotations you will read and hear over and over again on the Penn campus and in this newspaper are not actually English but a unique and somewhat confusing dialect known as PennSpeak. It's a kind of fuzzy, euphemistic code which people use out of habit and convenience -- also because it's easier than thinking through what they're really trying to say. This is communication at its most reflexive, with automatic responses and comfortable expressions which have come to mean very different things to people here than they do to those in the rest of the English-speaking world. But don't worry. Your professor is here to translate. We'll begin with the basics. PennSpeak: "I demand consultation." English: "I demand you do what I say." Consultation has nothing to do with asking people for their opinions. Even the most brain-dead College Hall ax-wielder knows that students do not want tuition to go up, athletic teams to be cut or services to be abandoned. And even the most brain-dead student leader knows that they know. Students who complain that they were not consulted aren't upset that the administration made its decisions without listening to their opinions. What they really mean is that they are angry the decision-makers decided the opinions of the people who pay their salaries and control their jobs bore more weight than those of the people who pay tuition and attend classes. PennSpeak: "You've been co-opted." English: "You agreed with the administration." Students who do not go around constantly demanding consultation have probably been co-opted. This means that they have become so dazzled by the brilliance and insightful world picture of administrators that they have lost the gem-like flame of student advocacy and give in without complaint to whatever hikes and cuts were going to happen anyway. PennSpeak: "You're reactionary." English: "You're liberal." This one takes a while to get used to. You see, at Penn, the reactionaries are the liberals -- not the conservatives like everywhere else -- because they react to administrative decisions after they are made. They always demand consultation and are never co-opted. They like rallies and sit-ins, speak loudly a lot, want careers in which they can help people, are addicted to politics and wept when President Clinton promised a New America. PennSpeak: "We're for responsible action." English: "We're conservative." Conservatives always say they are responsible. This means they "work with the administration," with a stress on the word "with." This also means they have been co-opted and are not reactionary. They like wearing tasteful clothing to Trustees meetings, don't like rallies and sit-ins, rarely raise their voices, want careers in which they can make a lot of money and tell people what to do, are addicted to politics and wept when Alan Greenspan agreed to serve another term. PennSpeak: "This report is confidential." English: "We don't want people to hear about it until there is nothing they can do about it." Lots of things at the University are labeled confidential. This is a piece of administrative PennSpeak that basically means they don't want the DP to write about it until it's too late for anyone to affect it. It usually doesn't work. Controversial things, or things that make the University look bad, are the most likely to be confidential. The good things they release immediately. In triplicate. PennSpeak: "This group is unrepresentative." English: "This group does not contain enough people who agree with me." What it basically means is that the person saying it believes he is in a position to speak for the mythical Average Penn Student, and that any group which expects to speak for students had better have lots of people just like him on it or it will be unrepresentative and therefore invalid. Of course, since everyone says it, that leads to the conclusion that everyone represents everyone else, which in the context of the usual twisted logic of PennSpeak seems almost to make sense.