Just a $10 Word for Euphemism
Is
euphemism just about being polite or is it in fact a form of censorship?
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kut/arts.artsmain?action=viewArticle&id=533349&sid=1
I’m a fan of Garry Trudeau’s
Doonesbury. How could I not be? I work in public radio, after all.
But recently the strip had an
especially smart and funny series spoofing the press-conference speech patterns
of Donald Rumsfeld. The joke was how the Secretary of
Defense turns reporters’ questions into his own rhetorical questions, which he
re-asks himself and then answers.
As Trudeau had him saying: “Am I
thrilled our troops in
The punchline
in the series was a soldier in
“Would I characterize that as
sucking? Heavens, yes.”
To me, that was about as perfect and
dark a piece of comedy as I hope to encounter in a newspaper, not least because
it derived its humor from a subtle deconstruction of language.
But a few of the newspaper editors
who run Doonesbury took it upon themselves to bowdlerize the strip, changing
the word “sucking” to a series of dashes or, in another case, to the euphemism “stinking.”
Americans used to be famously
plainspoken. But we’ve gotten into a bad habit in this country of defaulting to
euphemism , reflexively replacing any word that
somebody might find disagreeable with a word that is sure to upset nobody.
Always resorting to euphemism is a
bad habit, a way of infantilizing the culture by artificially sweetening the
language. Euphemisms are lies - maybe white lies, nice lies, polite lies...but
still, not the plain truth.
In other words, the impulse to
euphemize amounts to a kind of infectious Orwellian new-speak -- censorship lite. And euphemism becomes so entrenched so quickly we don’t
realize our language is being switched on us in a million tiny, everyday ways.
The other day in the grocery store,
I was trying to buy a package of bittersweet chocolate. But I discovered that
Hershey’s doesn’t sell bittersweet chocolate these days -- they now call it “mildly
sweet” chocolate. The word “bittersweet” apparently has been deemed too harsh.
And euphemism starts to rule in
large ways, as well, so that instead of using perfectly good, clear words like “invasion”
or “coup d’etat,” we feel obliged to invent the
clinical, weasely phrase “regime change.”
Or instead of putting on a
production of Victor Hugo’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame,” we change the name to “The
Bell-ringer of Notre Dame,” so as not to offend people who suffer from
scoliosis.
I once asked a record executive I
know why his industry lumped together every genre of predominantly
African-American music -- hip-hop, R & B, gospel, soul - as “urban music.”
“What are we are supposed to do,” he
said, “call it ‘black music’?”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Well,” he pointed out, “the biggest
audience for hip-hop consists of white suburban kids.”
“Right,” I said, “so why do you call
it ‘urban’ music?”
This is the problem of euphemism: by
striving to avoid offense, it fuzzes up language, and leeches out meaning.
Which I
would characterize as sucking.
This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.
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