Scourge of long words, empty words and euphemisms

OPINION Native people used to inhabit New Zealand but now we have ‘‘tangata whenua’’ or ‘‘indigenous’’ people.

And the weather is not what it used to be. It has become a ‘‘condition’’.

What were once drought, rain, frost and fog have become ‘‘drought conditions’’, ‘‘rainy conditions’’, ‘‘frosty or foggy conditions’’. We are urged to drive our cars according to conditions. The ‘‘weather’’ seems to have disappeared from the language to be replaced by the ‘‘meteorological conditions’’.

What was once known as the sea is now known as ‘‘the marine environment’’, the coast as the ‘‘coastal environment’’, school as the ‘‘school environment’’, and the economy has become the ‘‘economic environment’’.

Race has become ethnicity, sex become gender, hospitals have become providers, our bosses become our employers and we workers become employees. Apparently we have all become ‘‘stakeholders’’, but I’m not sure what that means.

We once had the useful phrase ‘‘man-made’’, as in ‘‘man-made pollution’’. But these days we read that climate change is ‘‘anthropogenic’’. People love the word anthropogenic because it looks and sounds more scientific and authoritative than man-made.

I gather that the word ‘‘anthropogenic’’ was invented by a Polish scientist who didn’t know the English have the simple phrase, ‘‘man-made’’.

For advice on using long words I turn to Henry Fowler’s 1926 book English Usage. Fowler writes that short words are the natural and best ways of saying what is to be said, are handier to use, more powerful in effect, and they increase rather than decrease spoken or written vigour.

Euphemisms are another matter. Fowler writes, ‘‘A euphemism is a mild, vague, or periphrastic expression as a substitute for a blunt or disagreeable truth’’.

The dead have long been known as the deceased or the departed.

Few people die these days. Rather, they perish, succumb, terminate, fall asleep, cease to be, they push up daisies, or are in the arms of Jesus. Undertakers have become funeral directors and coffins become caskets.

Were Fowler to revisit us today, he would be amazed to learn that madness has become a mental disorder, lunatic asylums become mental institutions, the blind have become visually impaired, the poor become the underprivileged, barbers become hairdressers, prostitutes become sex workers, rubbish tips become landfills and grocery stores become superettes.

Headquarters for promoting euphemisms in New Zealand are the police and the Department of Justice. Police officers do not catch a crook and send him to prison.

Rather, officers ‘‘locate’’ or ‘‘apprehend’’ a male Caucasian person, who is not sent to jail but to a ‘‘corrections facility’’, where he is known, not as a prisoner, but as an ‘‘inmate’’, supervised, not by guards, but by ‘‘corrections officers’’, whose job is to ‘‘rehabilitate the offenders’’.

Don’t get me going on abstract nouns.