From the Toronto Star

THE NOTEBOOK: A CULTURAL BACKGROUNDER

What's another word for euphemism?

William J. Astore
history news network

Judging by the local newspaper that serves the rural area of Pennsylvania where I live, hunters no longer shoot and kill deer: They harvest them. "Harvest" is the latest euphemism for killing, and it's applied not just to the culling of the deer herd but also to the killing of bears, bobcats and other predators.

In his speech on national security before the American Enterprise Institute last month, former vice-president Dick Cheney complained of the "emergence of euphemisms (under the Obama administration) that strive to put an imaginary distance between the American people and the terrorist enemy." Instead of being at war with terrorists and other "killers and would-be mass murderers," we were now involved, Cheney dismissively noted, in so-called "overseas contingency operations," a catch-all term adopted by the Obama administration in place of the "war on terror."

Yet for all of Cheney's posturing about the allegedly milquetoast euphemisms of Obama, he persisted in invoking "enhanced interrogation" for methods of torture that have been prosecuted as war crimes by the U.S. But the former vice-president did put his finger on a problem: Our collective acquiescence in the temporizing – the terrorizing, even – of our language.

Cheney himself continues to stare unblinkingly at euphemisms such as "enhanced interrogation methods," which cloak the reality of bodies being slammed against walls. Our eyes glaze over when we see the repetition of terms such as "collateral damage," an overused military euphemism that obscures the reality of innocents blown to bits or babies buried under rubble.

Perhaps our temporizing began right after World War II, when the Department of War was folded under, and rebranded as, the Department of Defense. Coincidentally, just before this occurred, George Orwell penned his classic essay "The Politics and the English Language" (1946). It remains telling:

"(P)olitical language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: This is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: This is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: This is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them."

This last point is essential, and it also explains the purpose of the phrase "enhanced interrogation." How many Americans in 2002 would have favoured a "war on terror" if our government plainly admitted it was using torture to terrorize suspects?

As President Obama famously said during the 2008 Presidential Campaign, "Words matter." But, following the lead of the former vice-president, Obama also made the political choice of citing "enhanced interrogation techniques" four times in his speech on national security last month, though at first reference he did qualify the phrase.

In the same speech, Obama demonstrated his own linguistic dexterity, coining the phrase "prolonged detention" to cloak his proposal of indefinite imprisonment of "enemy combatants" without trial. Prolonged detention: It sounds quaint, like a few days of after-school punishment, instead of what it could become: open-ended confinement to a gulag.

We all recognize that we live in an age of public relations, propaganda and advertising. Post-modernism as well as deconstruction seemingly support the malleability of meaning and the lability of language. Even so, whether you're Dick Cheney or Barack Obama, changing the words does not change the reality. Instead, our linguistic gymnastics not only tortures our language: It cripples our thinking and pollutes our souls.

The most blatant example of this pollution occurred in Nazi Germany, as brilliantly exposed by Victor Klemperer in The Language of the Third Reich. Klemperer shows, for example, how the word "fanatical" was redefined under Nazi rule from a pejorative to a desirable trait. This and similar linguistic barbarisms, Klemperer concluded, acted as "Poison which you drink unawares and which has its effect."

Let's stop drinking the poison. Let's stop references to "enhanced interrogation" or "overseas contingency operations." Let's speak plainly of torture and of killing, whether during hunting season in the forests and fields of Pennsylvania or during combat in the plains and mountains of Afghanistan.

At least then we won't be hiding behind the false camouflage of euphemisms to justify our blood sports, and our even bloodier wars.

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), lives in Williamsport, Pa., and teaches history at the Pennsylvania College of Technology.