We bleg, you respond – this time by emailing “examples of jargon that is is designed explicitly as a euphemism to disguise the core reality.” One reader writes:
The use of the words “Collateral Damage” has always made me cringe. The US Dept of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms defines collateral damage as the “unintentional or incidental injury or damage to persons or objects that would not be lawful military targets in the circumstances ruling at the time.”
Really? Killing someone is “damage”. Collateral Death is more like it.
Another points to “‘disposition matrix’, to refer to the CIA’s kill list.” Another:
While the titles of most legislation coming out of Congress usually makes me cringe , I’m going to have to go with USA PATRIOT Act as perhaps the most Orwellian, in that it contains some of the most anti-Bill-of-Rights (if not anti-Constitutional) legislation ever enacted in this country. Basically, it’s little more than “be patriotic and give up a good chunk of your rights because terrorism!” I count the Patriot Act and its reauthorizations as perhaps Osama Bin Laden’s greatest accomplishment …
Another reader:
“Ethnic cleansing” always struck me as a gross Orwellian term. Sounds like something is being made better and more clean. I was very surprised when the U.S. used the term regarding Bosnia (although using “genocide” has legal implications for a nation). Still, there has to be a better term.
Shifting to employment:
When my mother was laid off from her job as a bank teller at the age of 60, she was told that she was “non-selected”.
Another has three more: “rightsize, early retirement option, workforce imbalance correction.” Another writes:
When large companies outsource a division to a cheaper labor location, say India or even Iowa, the term used to describe the new lower cost department is “Center Of Excellence”. The original name of New York’s deservedly world famous “Hospital for Special Surgery” was “Hospital For The Relief Of The Ruptured And Crippled”.
Another:
One of my personal favorites is “knowledge transfer” as in “China actively promotes “knowledge transfer,” a euphemism for stealing your technology.”
And another:
I used to work in the mortgage industry, and the company I worked for was in the process of merging with very similar organization. However, there was a problem that was making everyone nervous. Many of the employees from the other company did the exact same job that we did. There was significant overlap. But don’t worry! None of us were going to get fired! No firings here. That would have been bad for morale. Instead, we were told that management was looking into “eliminating unnecessary redundancies”. This cold and technical language struck me as perverse. These were fathers, mothers, husbands, and wives who were about to lose their jobs, not “redundancies” – as if they were unfeeling machines that could just be disposed of.
Another quick one. During my time with this company, we were under investigation for fraud by federal prosecutors. In the end, we agreed to pay a fine in exchange for an end to the investigation. This was reported to all employees in a positively spun email that stated we had “met all of our legal obligations”. It seems to me that when you have broken the law that’s the exact opposite of meeting your legal obligations. All we did was pay a fine to get the feds off our backs. This use of language irritates the hell out of me.
Another turns to parenting:
This might be more innocuous than most, but I’ve always gotten a kick out of the language of the Ferber Method, where parents teach babies how to “self-soothe”. This is of course, a polite way of saying let the baby cry.
This one’s a doozy:
You know the little safety talks the flight attendants always give at the beginning of flights? I was once privileged to hear one that included the phrase, “In the event of an unscheduled water landing …” Which of course begs the question, how many scheduled water landings does that airline make?
The Dish 