Euphemisms (A Work in [Very Slow] Progress)

euphemism: an agreeable or inoffensive expression substituted for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant

This entry's governing syllogism:

1. A word is the shape taken by a thought to make that thought intelligible to more than one person.
2. A euphemism is a distorted word.
3. Those who use euphemisms do not think straight.

C.S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength was published in 1945. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949. Both take place in societies in which "common sense" has become so diluted by euphemisms that the citizens cannot see what's happening right under their noses: namely, that they're being dehumanized in the name of humanity.

Our society is becoming more like the ones envisioned by Lewis and Orwell everyday. Indeed, most if not all of our most heated political, social, and religious debates have become so befogged with verbal imprecision that many people no longer even know what the debates are about (although they think they do) let alone qualify as responsible participants in a serious discussion.

The following may someday be a reasonably complete list of the contemporary euphemisms most to blame for the swamp-like consistency of our common socio-political ground:

abortion
It's hard to remember, but this term once referred to any process that had been stopped before it reached fruition. Now, like the term make love, it is used exclusively to refer to human reproduction (or the lack thereof). What makes it a euphemism is that it stops short of saying what is being aborted. And for good reason: Whether one considers the developing life to be human (a "baby") or sub-human (a "fetus"), it's certainly life, and therefore the ending of it is, at least in some sense, an act of killing. One sometimes still hears proponents of legalized euthanasia (another euphemism) using the term mercy killing, yet one never hears proponents of legal abortion arguing for the right of a woman to kill the fetus growing within her. By the standard set by such linguistic tergiversation, we might justwell refer to the killing of anyone as an "abortion" (in that any killing is the stopping of a process--a thirty-two-year-old murder victim could be said to have been aborted in the ninety-sixth trimester.) Not surprisingly, "pro-choice," the euphemism most preferred by legal-abortion advocates, is equally incomplete, as it fails to clarify what "choice" the advocate favors. The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll takes the absurdity even further, referring to "pro-life" performers (e.g., Pat Boone) not as "pro-life" (which they obviously are) but as "anti-choice," as if those who consider Roe v. Wade to be unconstitutional oppose any selecting among options. What term, then, should be used to refer to what happens when the life growing in a human womb is ended? Well, selecting a bon mot is seldom easy, but "prenatal killing" would be a step (if only a "baby step," so to speak) in the right direction.

adult
As a noun, this word still suggests a mature, full-grown human being, one who has successfully put away childish things. As an adjective, however, it has come to mean "pornographic" (as in "adult magazines" or "adult content"). As pornography is the deliberate arousal of any audience's sexual desire for the purposes of making money, there is nothing "grown-up" about its creation or its consumption. (I was going to saying that there is nothing mature about its creation or its consumption, but mature has also become a euphemistic synonym for "pornographic.") No one is so easily titillated as the immature.

developmentally disabled
This nine-syllable term has become the euphemism of choice among those who care for the mentally retarded. "Retarded," they say, has become a negative and-or outdated term. It is difficult to see how a term that means "slow" (retarded) is more "negative" than a term that means "incapable of" (disabled)--or, for that matter, how "developmentally" is less pejorative than "mentally." Frankly, I would rather be mentally slow than incapable of any development whatsoever. The fact is that any term used to label something that we regard as deficient will take on negative connotations; so changing the terminology without changing the nature of the thing to which the terminology refers solves nothing.

tolerance