Weasel Words
and Other Perversions of the Language
by Peter Donnelly
We all like to have a chuckle at the euphemisms invented by bureaucrats, public relations officers,
and assorted hand-wringers -- terms like
animal companions for pets and challenged for handicapped. But what
is more disturbing is the way euphemisms and perverted meanings creep into the popular language
and choke off the truth about things -- largely through the influence of journalists who are too
pusillanimous to question the official verbiage that is fed to them.
I got to thinking about this during the holiday season, which used to be called Christmas time.
I suppose advertisers can't be blamed for wanting to include everyone in the annual
spending spree, while public officials are eager not to offend anyone by suggesting a preference for Christian
observances. But a curious thing has happened in recent years. Not only have terms like holiday shopping and
happy holidays become ubiquitous, but even in places where Christmas is the
only appropriate term, it has either been replaced or suppressed, as for example in the nonsense
phrases holiday tree and holiday carol. I even saw a TV commercial the other day
that featured December 25 circled on a calendar and then referred to a "countdown to the
holidays". (2003 update: CNN now takes the prize for this scrolling headline: "Pope Delivers Message on Meaning
of Holiday.") It seems that in our desperation to be inclusive of all cultures, we have
decided to exclude (at least publicly)
any direct reference to a feast day that is an important part of the culture of a majority of
North Americans.
At least this example might be understandable as an attempt to avoid giving offense. What I find
far less forgivable is the deliberate or reckless perversion of meaning, and the careless discarding of words that
are clear and truthful in favour of those that obfuscate and deceive -- otherwise known as
weasel words. A few examples follow, along with some miscellaneous gripes about the misuse of language.
abuse
"A federal police spokesman said it was unclear whether Kampusch ... had been abused by the 44-year-old man believed to have kidnapped
her." What does CNN think abuse means? For heaven's sake, the girl/woman had been confined in a small room for eight years.
Isn't that enough to constitute abuse? See sexual assault, below.
(After I wrote this, the BBC reported: "She has never revealed whether her kidnapper forced her into any sort of relationship."
Evidently they meant "sexual relations", since it is clear that the man did force her into a relationship of some sort,
if only of captor and captive.)
advisory
At some point in the last 50 years or so, someone decided that advisory should be turned into a noun with the meaning of
bulletin. In the U.S., what used to be called a small-craft warning is now called a small-craft advisory.
That usage can perhaps be justified: the weather service is simply advising that it might get rough out there, not warning that it's unsafe to take out a small craft at all. Inevitably, however, advisory has become a simple euphemism, perhaps suggesting that there is less potential danger (q.v.). Thus the CBC reports: "About a million people who have been under a boil-water advisory in Greater Vancouver for 12 days have finally been told it's safe to drink from the taps." Surely the danger of being poisoned merits a full-scale warning, not a bit of friendly advice.
correctional centre
Of course, there's a long history of coining euphemisms for prisons or jails, the euphemisms
going hand in hand with what the authorities of the time thought they were accomplishing.
Back when it was thought you could force convicts to repent their sins, prisons were called
penitentiaries. Now the system is evidently driven by the theory that behaviour
can be corrected, so we have (at least in Canada) correctional centres.
(See also The Centre Centre.)
Never
mind that little or nothing is done to rehabilitate the inmates; at least the word
conveys some noble purpose. The same can't be said for institution, as in Edmonton Institution,
which you might take for some establishment for research or higher learning, like the Smithsonian, if you
did not know it was a maximum-security prison.
For short-term stays, in Canada
and abroad, detention centre is now the preferred term; and of course people
are detained, not imprisoned.
defence
Okay, I understand that no nation wants to be seen as an aggressor, so armies have been replaced
by defence forces and the War Department has become the Department of Defence. But
government euphemisms are one thing and truth in journalism is another, so it bothers me when I
see a reporter stand up in front of the camera in the occupied West Bank and say the area has been
taken over by Israeli defence forces. If the Israelis are the
defenders, then the Palestinians are the aggressors -- and the reporters are taking sides.
international
Some time ago the words foreign and foreigner were banned from North American journalism,
perhaps on the grounds that they had acquired some taint of prejudice. The word international
has filled the gap, so we now have international news in our newspapers, international students studying at
our universities, and so on. But how can a word
that means "existing or carried on between different nations" (Concise Oxford) also mean "foreign to one's own nation"?
For example, do you elect to study Japanese as your international language, when Japanese is in fact anything but international?
interview
A battlefield detainee (prisoner of war) in Afghanistan was reported to have been
handed over to American troops so that he could be interviewed. Prisoners are no
longer subject to interrogation, a one-sided process that might involve bright lights
and other coercive measures, i.e. torture. They now enjoy the
friendly, mutual exchange that takes place in an interview.
Middle East
Once upon a time there were the Near East, the Middle East, and the Far East.
Now there's only a Middle East, and the term is almost exclusively used to describe a very small part of
what used to be the Near East.
The phrase has probably escaped the general purge of Eurocentric terms like Orient
and Far East because it is a convenient way for journalists to refer to Israel and Palestine
without going anywhere near the thorny issue of who is entitled to what piece of western Asia.
Just the same it seems a strange perversion of the language.
Just what East are Israel and Palestine in the middle of, anyway?
offshore
The bending of this word to the senses of foreign, overseas, or abroad thankfully is in
decline. The usage seems to have originated in the business world and from there made its way into
common use. My theory is that it enjoyed its decades in the sun because abroad sounded vaguely sexist,
while foreign was succumbing to another kind of political correctness (see international, above).
Never mind that offshore is confusing and often at odds with what is meant. If you
are putting your money into offshore oil, are you investing in drilling platforms off the coast, or in
Arabian petroleum futures? Is money crossing the Mexican border from the United States going offshore?
potential danger
Danger (or risk) is the potential for harm (or, as we would hear more often today, negative impact), so putting potential in front of it does nothing except weaken the word. Even worse are possible potential risk and might be a potential risk. It seems we're trying to put as many layers of potentiality as possible between us and any actual harm, with the idea that doing so may avert it.
relatively
This isn't a euphemism, but it qualifies as a weasel word because it is used to weaken the sense of other words. The trouble is, most of the adjectives or adverbs it commonly modifies are already at least implicitly comparative. Does relatively add any information to "There were relatively few people on the streets that day," or "Fred is relatively tall"? We seem to be afraid that without the qualifier, we will be taken to mean that the streets were empty, or that Fred's height is over nine feet, when in fact we mean only that the streets were unusually quiet, and that Fred is taller than the average. Once you start noticing this usage you will see it everywhere, even in the best writing. One particularly egregious example, from the BBC, will suffice: "The numbers of infections identified in older age groups are still relatively small compared to [those in] younger people."
sexual assault
Some years ago the word rape went into decline because it was at last recognized that there are forms of sexual assault that do not include vaginal penetration. The trouble is that sexual assault is now often used as a sort of code word for rape, with the result that we are right back where we started. Citing a press release, the CBC reported: "The attack took place after a man entered the lab, approached the victim, tied her hands behind her back, and beat her unconscious. The assailant removed her clothing, and then sexually assaulted her." And here's a headline from the CBC web site: "Wisconsin man convicted of sexually assaulting dead deer gets more jail time." The man may have practised bestiality, or necrophilia, or some other perverted act, but I don't think he can have been guilty of any kind of assault, since the animal was already dead.
suspect
I don't know whether to put this one down to excessive caution or just sloppiness.
Suspect used to be the word for an identifiable person who was accused
of, or at least under suspicion for, a crime. Law enforcement officers and journalists
found the word handy for avoiding libel actions brought by suspects who turned out to
be innocent. But now the word is also used to refer to the person, whether identified or
not, who actually committed the crime.
Maybe perpetrator is too big a word for
newscasters or the hosts of reality TV shows, but surely it's nonsense to say
"The suspect then pulled out a shotgun and blew the victim's head off," or "Watch as
the suspect drives the stolen Hummer through a crowd of schoolchildren." In fact, it's worse than
nonsense, because it undermines the useful, non-judgmental meaning of the word suspect.
X times smaller than
This comes under the category of using words as if they meant nothing. "Mars, whose two tiny moons combined are
millions of times less massive than our full-size moon...", says Scientific American, which ought to know better.
Object A can be one-millionth the size of object B; that doesn't make it one million times smaller, because if it is
even one time smaller, it ceases to exist.
world-class
I'm including this ubiquitous epithet here just because it doesn't mean anything at all, yet people persist in using it as if it did. Actually, I have heard it used at least once in a way that made sense: a footballer was described as a "world-class player", which was true, because he played for his national team at the world level; quite clearly he was a member of an elite class. However, you are far more likely to read of world-class facilities, entertainments, indeed anything that can be rated, even cities.
But what sets a world-class hotel, for example, apart from any other? Is it a hotel worthy to be placed in any city of the world? Perhaps, at a stretch; but it is harder to justify world-class getaways, world-class fossil sites, and world-class deer hunts, to name just three that come up on one page of an internet search. The phrase reminds me of those signs you still occasionally see on burger joints in the middle of nowhere: "World-famous!" You just chuckle at those, because it's a completely unprovable (and unfalsifiable) claim, not meant to be taken seriously. "World-class", on the other hand, is part of the verbal arsenal of every politician and huckster who wants to push through another megaproject: you want a world-class stadium, don't you?
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