Spit & Polish: 27 November 2011

Why wade through swamps of euphemisms and cloudy vagueness when one clear word will do?

Have you heard the phrase "security architecture"? I had never heard the term until President Barack Obama used it in a speech about the ability of the United States to help its allies and protect its sovereignty.

I googled the phrase and found this description: "It is a plan to align a set of principles that describe the security services that a system is required to provide to meet the needs of its users; the system elements required to implement the services; and also the performance levels required in the elements to deal with the threat environment. The goal of this cohesive unit is to protect corporate information."

Trying to understand that convoluted sentence is like trying to straighten out a tangle of barbed wire which has been electrified. I think it means "to connect all the aspects of the security system in a unified sequence".

That is such a typically American trait - to use 63 words when 13 will do, but let's not blame the US alone. Throughout the world, people in the military, police and especially in politics, are skilled in calling a spade a "utilitarian tool manipulated by hand in order to gather substances and remove them to a different location".

We all do it. How often do you hear the phrase "at this point in time" when all it means is "now"?

"At this point in time" is like an emergency door though which you can bolt to safety. It implies that at a different point in time, anything that was previously said no longer has any meaning, which is why politicians use it so often. These are "weasel words": "sustainable", "optimised", "framework" and "going forward" and they are all emergency fire-escapes.

When we are under pressure, we cover our insecurities by hauling out big, impressive words, as many as we can manage. We do so for two reasons: the first is to make ourselves look smarter than we actually are, and the second is to conceal our embarrassment about how little we really have to say.

The finest example of these conversational dodges came from Winston Churchill, who used the term "a terminological inexactitude" when what he really meant was "a lie".

Author George Orwell, also hit the mark when he said: "Political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible ... thus political language has to consist largely of euphemisms, question-begging, and sheer, cloudy vagueness."

That is why, when confronted with a big, fat mess, we don't call it that. We prefer to call it an "issue". If a judge, for instance, is driving various vehicles that all have the same licence plates, and has an accident, we don't call it a crime, it becomes "a sensitive issue".

A perfect example is "extraordinary rendition", a term created by the US secret service. It meant that the CIA, for example, could abduct a foreign national and transport him to an undisclosed location, where that person would be interrogated and tortured.

We use "weasel words" because we feel awkward, so we haul out all the oblique, soft-edged euphemisms we can muster. For example, we see a grossly fat person, and we use words such as "obese" or "overweight" or even "heavy-set". Pejorative words, such as "cripple" or "deformed" are masked by words such as "disabled" or even "differently abled" - and that is a good thing. Those words are chosen out of politeness and compassion and they involve respect. But the real root is our own discomfort in that situation.

While wading through this swamp of euphemisms, I found an internet site, www.thestraightdope. com, run by a guy called Cecil Adams.

I found him because, on radio, I played the song Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree and a listener called in to ask about the meaning of the "yellow ribbon". I checked Adams's website and found a fascinating account of where it started, what it means and why the song became a universal hit.

As I read further, I saw that by far the most queries he had received on the site were about euphemisms. One of the questions posed was: Does anybody really rest in a "rest room"?

His excellent answer has to do with the many euphemisms describing our bodily functions. So why do people who feel "a call of nature" coming on, go to "the rest room" where nobody ever rests?

He lists eight different names that reveal, over three centuries, just how coy we are about these matters. One of the oldest words is the American term "the john", which appeared in the 18th century. There was a female equivalent, "the jane", but it did not catch on. He followed that with "latrine", "lavatory", "the loo", "toilet", "wash room", WC (short for "water closet") and the schoolboy term "the bog". He even has a section on his website about how astronauts deal with these matters.

He ends his essay by pointing out that we have finally reduced the name to the simple formula of two words: "Ladies" and "Gents".

But it's disconcerting to know just how long it took us to arrive at that solution.