Euphemisms ‘R’ Us

When real words are too accurate

From “alternative facts” to “middle-aged politicians,” Americans in our age, and maybe not just in our age, need to be fluent in euphemism when reading about almost any issue. Pro-Life and Pro-Choice elbowed their way into the national debate years ago. And it keeps getting worse. Please spare us “tender age shelters” when talking about juvee.

This past week, the euphemisms came in waves. One after another. Crashing on the shores of straight talk. Wearing away the beaches of reality. Trying to smooth over, or erode, some things that really shouldn’t be smoothed.

Have you been keeping up with the U.S. Supreme Court and the social media hearings? The government — the Biden administration — is accused of pressuring some of these social media companies in a number of ways, and for a number of topics. Now it’s all being untangled (hopefully) by The Supremes.

But the other day, when one techie type tried to slip “content moderation” into the hearing, Justice Samuel Alito, bless him, asked if content moderation wasn’t just euphemism for censorship.

Of course it is! But don’t expect the opposing counsels to give up on their jargon. Like a wise man once said, language is the Little Round Top of argument. You take that high ground, and you are hard to defeat.

For perhaps a better example, take the front page of the paper on Tuesday. The headline read:

Retailers redo self-checkout in part to cut cost of ‘shrink’

Well, at least the newsroom’s headline writers understand euphemism when they see/read/smell it. They put “shrink” in scare quotes. And well they should.

Walmart and other big stores are going 180 on the checkout line, moving customers back towards checkout lines staffed with real people. All in an attempt to stop all this “shrink” — which is how PR folks at these big box stores pronounce the word “theft.”

Shrink is shoplifting. Thievery. Pilfering. It shrinks the bottom line, but it’s still one of the basics. So basic there’s a Commandment against it. But even lawyers have nothing on the jargon coming out of Big Business.

Digging deeper into the paper a few pages, we note that 100% of the people of Gaza are now victims of “food insecurity.”

Ah, we remember hearing that one for the first time: It was about a decade ago. It still stings the ears.

Food insecurity is hunger. Stomach pain. Starvation.

Gaza is facing a man-made famine. The United States is trying to create a man-made port/harbor to ship food to the starving, but it isn’t going up fast enough. The papers say that one in three kids under the age of 2 in Gaza is “acutely malnourished.” We can debate who’s at fault for that. But what we can’t debate is that children are dying of hunger.

They aren’t food insecure. They are starving to death.

We are reminded — as we often are — of the late, great Paul Greenberg. He fought for real language, and real thought, in this column. And we fondly quote him today, a fitting end to this editorial:

“There you have the hallmark of euphemism: It obfuscates meaning by expanding language, turning a solid into a gas. In physics it’s called sublimation, in politics rationalization. It’s quite a process. It can give the bloodiest deeds an antiseptic sound.

“Although the people killed as a result are just as dead.”