Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER
On the whole, I believe, good writing—clear, honest, vigorous, and interesting writing—will avoid euphemisms. In everyday speech, however, euphemisms are often appropriate, even necessary, to show courtesy and regard for others whom you may not know well. In certain situations, you steer clear of certain words and phrases unless you want to bring scorn upon your head. But even in everyday speech many euphemisms are silly, and in political speech they are intentionally deceptive.
Take climate change, for example. Frank Luntz, a Republican operative who specializes in misleading phrases, recommended to George W. Bush that his administration use that phrase instead of the more honest global warming. By now, of course, even global warming is something of a euphemism, leading some apologists for fossil fuels to tell us that it may be a good thing if we get a little warmer. Atmospheric heating would be closer to the frightening truth, or climate catastrophe, but even these phrases, repeated often enough, may lose their punch. Sheer staleness can turn forthright terms into euphemisms. That is why we need words that are both honest and fresh; we should tell the truth in many different ways.
After all, the professional euphemizers like Luntz are pretty good at coming up with fresh euphemisms. Educational Freedom Accounts are really vouchers, or payments of taxpayers’ money, to families who want to send their children to private schools. The MOMS Act, a warm and snuggly acronym for the warm and snuggly More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed Act, now under debate in Congress, would offer benefits during pregnancy, including a website that lists many resources but leaves out agencies that perform abortions. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 has something to do with inflation (by reducing the federal deficit), but it spends a lot of money on sustainable energy and extending the Affordable Care Act, and it allows Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies on prices. When the UNH administration makes drastic cuts in staff and programs, it is called a budget reset. When a corporation fires workers, it is to down-size, even to right-size, the firm. When Republicans want to severely restrict abortions, it advocates setting some minimum national standards. And the new Trump administration will have a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) whose avowed purpose is to consolidate government agencies and trim their workforce but whose real purpose is almost certainly to cut social programs, including Social Security.
Agentless passives are often euphemisms. “Mistakes were made” became famous during the Watergate hearings. Another kind is the quasi-confession. Pete Hegseth recently told a Senate Committee “I’m not perfect,” which is perfectly true.
Some words were once euphemisms but have now become so familiar that they have lost much of their softening power. Execute and execution still have a broad range of meanings: An executor executes a will, an executive executes the decisions of the board, a gymnast earns points for execution of her program. Their Latin root meant “follow out” or “follow through,” and that general sense is still in play in English. But as early as the fifteenth century execution was deployed as a shorthand for something like writ of execution, which meant the confiscation of property and/or the killing of someone after a judicial proceeding. When a prisoner is executed today, we readily imagine the electric chair or a syringe and the victim’s death agonies. But the word is still somewhat euphemistic: We do not hear officials or news reporters saying “the prisoner was killed” or “put to death.”
Most euphemisms remain euphemisms. Killing people, even when it is a morally or legally defensible thing to do, is very often buried under anodyne terms. Recently a high-school student with a gun was neutralized by the police: they shot him dead. That term has been in military parlance since the 1930s and had a revival during the Vietnam War, during which the Phoenix program tried to neutralize the Communists. Pacify can still mean “bring into peaceful relations, calm, placate, or reconcile,” but the pacification program in Vietnam displaced millions of villagers and killed hundreds of thousand of civilians along with combatants. It made a desert and called it peace. When bombs aimed at military installations kill innocent civilians they cause collateral damage, even though those who order the bombings know perfectly well what will happen. We should at least call it deliberate collateral damage. Many people who are not agents of the military or police still shrink from saying that their mother or father has died; they prefer to say passed or passed away. Those phrases have religious implications: the person is not really dead but has passed on to another realm. Many people believe this, but many people do not and still say passed.
It may be stretching the point, but I think silence can also be a euphemism. Over many years I have seldom heard American meteorologists on television say anything about climate change, let alone global warming. They duly report the records we are constantly breaking everywhere, but they don’t ask why they are so often broken. They could reply that they report weather, not climate, but what is climate if not weather over a few years? In Europe and elsewhere it is different: meteorologists in many countries speak of global warming as if it is a fact, which it is.
But let me end on a less contentious note. Akin to euphemism is understatement, though understatement is effective only if the hearer knows it is understatement. “He’s not my favorite person” almost always means you dislike him. “He’s no Einstein” means you think he’s stupid. After your uninsured house burns down and you’ve lost everything in it, you might say “It could have been worse,” presenting a stiff upper lip to your friends or TV audience.
The finest example of understatement I know comes from Dante’s Inferno. Dante is visiting the circle of the lustful, and he meets the shade of Francesca da Rimini. She was married to Gianciotto Malatesta, but she spent time with his brother Paolo reading books together. One day, she says, they were reading the story of Sir Lancelot, and when they reached the passage where Lancelot kisses Guinevere, the wife of King Arthur, Paolo kissed Francesca. “And that day we read no more.”
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.
Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.
