Prisoners aren’t ‘clients’, because words can never buck reality

Prisoners should not be called residents or clients, Dominic Raab, the Justice Secretary, is insisting. I’m not sure how much he wants to be seen as Mr Mackay, the tough screw in Porridge, rather than the mild-mannered Mr Barrowclough, but he happens to be right.

As a punishment, prisoners are deprived of their liberty. We don’t add punishments such as calling them jailbirds or scum, but to call them clients is an insult too. After all, if they were in a hotel resembling a prison, they’d have plenty to complain about.

That was one of the things that came out so clearly when innocent citizens returning from abroad were made to stay in quarantine hotels. They said the places were like prisons (horrible food, windows that didn’t open, rare exercise breaks). But they were prisons, precisely because the inmates couldn’t leave.

Inmate is a good example of language being coloured by reality, no matter what its original connotations were. It began as a neutral word for someone sharing lodgings at an inn. Only after it became the ordinary word for a fellow prisoner in a jail or madhouse did it gain the pejorative overtones that guarantee that its use would be laughable now if applied to holidaymakers in a hotel.

It’s always the way with euphemisms. In Evelyn Waugh’s novella on the American way of death, an embalmer says to an orderly: “Will you tell Mr Joyboy that my Loved One is ready for posing? I think he should come now. He is firming.” Firming is really rigor mortis. And The Loved One, the dead person, gives the story its title. The more the phrase is repeated in the book, the weirder it seems.

I am sorry to say that loved ones have figured often in broadcasts during these pandemic years. No doubt it was meant kindly. But what of all those people who died and weren’t much loved?

Waugh, of course, was fascinated by a Californian attempt to effect a cultural shift in attitudes to death. After all, he had called an earlier novel Vile Bodies,a reference to the burial service in the Book of Common Prayer, which is very plain in its language about the dead body that we commit “to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust”.

Yet despite constant failures through the decades to change reality by changing the language describing it, we find more and more that organisations are getting at us via special vocabulary.

Stakeholder is a good example. It originally meant someone who could be trusted to look after the money – the stake – when a wager was made. In recent years it was extended to anyone who had a dog in the fight, a foot in the trough or at least some part in the running of an enterprise.

The National Trust loves

stakeholder. It must own a copy of The Observer’s Book of Stakeholders, because under the services it offers online it puts first: “Identify stakeholders, and design and facilitate a range of workshops and other tools to constructively engage them.” I expect that requires a fee of the kind that local authorities can pay.

If I was holding a nice sharp stake, I’d be tempted to hammer it into undead corporations – the DVLA, train operators, banks, airlines – that mangle language from their first lie: “Your call is important to us.” First among offenders are personnel departments that have changed their name to HR yet don’t even know how to pronounce it, preferring Haitch-r. But that (if you’ll bear with me) is another story.