Paul: Parsing line between vocabulary fairness and euphemism

By Pamela Paul / The New York Times

If Donald Trump ends up serving a term in prison (there’s still hope!), I’d relish the chance to refer to him as an ex-con. Like “felon,” the brute force of the term, with its hard-boiled matter-of-factness, would be extremely satisfying.

But the very power of that label has made it practically taboo. In its place, even federal prosecutors have adopted phrases like “justice involved” or “justice impacted” to describe those convicted of crimes; as if we could reform the entire criminal justice system simply by using new words.

Much ado has been made of euphemism inflation, the ceaseless efforts to reform the English language toward desired social or political ends. The well-worn euphemism treadmill has fueled many a George Carlin bit, caused George Orwell to toss and turn feverishly in his grave and led even the most deeply sensitive among us to a grumpy grandpa “What are we supposed to call it now?” moment.

But while it’s easy to make fun of the changes, it’s worth digging deeper to examine the underlying logic of what can feel like — but rarely is — arbitrary new terminology.

Let’s return to the old “ex-con.” It’s a moniker that immediately conjures Robert Mitchum’s unrepentant villain in 1962’s “Cape Fear.” Even “former prisoner” and “formerly incarcerated person” have grown passe. But “justice involved” and “justice impacted” go further yet. They not only avoid stigma, they also remove the implication of responsibility altogether, as if the crime were something that happened to the criminal rather than an act he committed himself.

The right euphemism not only removes blame, it also reassigns it. Thus, “prisons” become the “carceral system” or part of the “carceral state,” which suggests that the act of imprisoning people may itself be the crime. The implied question is: What gives the state a right to put people away?

One major goal of lexical reform is to humanize and dignify the person behind a simple label. This is exemplified by what The Associated Press calls “person-first” language, recommended in its latest guidebook, issued in May, when referring to anyone implicated in the criminal justice system, avoiding terms like “inmate” and “juvenile.”

Another example is the word “slave,” which suggests a totalizing condition, while the increasingly preferred “enslaved person” emphasizes that the person is someone upon whom slavery (or “enslavement”) has been imposed.

Passive descriptors can be turned into active ones, and thus made more powerful. To call someone a “slaveholder” or “slave owner” implies that a person just happens to have another human being in his possession. Whereas to call that person an “enslaver” makes clear that one human being has actively subjugated and dehumanized another.

Not all these rephrasings are necessarily downgrades, or even wrong. There is inarguably a power, sometimes a necessary one, in reconstituting terms, especially when they refer to human beings. As Toni Morrison once explained, “The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.”

But euphemisms can inadvertently rob words of their moral force. “Enslaved person” humanizes the victim, but it also softens the indignity of what is a fundamentally dehumanizing condition. When, for example, journalist Ian Urbina writes about contemporary “sea slaves” in the South China Sea, the abject state of the world’s victims is delivered in a verbal gut punch in a way “enslaved people at sea” would not.

Active descriptors can be substituted with passive ones in ways that rob people of power or agency, deliberately so: Obese people become “people with obesity”; those with a condition irrespective of action. Likewise, an “alcoholic,” which itself replaced the derisive “drunk,” is now a person suffering from an “alcohol abuse disorder.”

In these cases, the obvious goal is to neutralize terms that have come to be seen as loaded. “Overweight” becomes verboten because it assumes a certain body size to be normal. Along the same lines, skin care companies like Unilever got rid of the word “normal” to describe skin that was neither especially oily nor dry.

Many of these changes seem neutral on the face of it. The replacement of “homeless” with “unhoused” at first glance seems like a superfluous switcheroo. But key to the change is the implication that the government has failed to provide a home, not that someone has lost one. Similarly, “poor” neighborhoods become “under-resourced communities.” And truancy, which feels like an accusation of juvenile delinquency, instead becomes “absenteeism,” which humbly suggests a box left unticked on the attendance list, more the fault of the school than the student.

Language has always driven and reflected societal change. In Orwell’s time, vague language was used by the powerful to defend or obscure brutality (e.g., British rule in India, Stalin’s purges, Soviet deportations).

This tendency still exists in political language (see “enhanced interrogation”). But today’s vague language is more often used as a means to ward off bad things so we don’t have to deal with harsh reality. Euphemistic language becomes a kind of wishcasting, and perhaps even a way of avoiding — or covering up a lack of — more substantive reform.

At a time when words are frequently treated as tools of oppression or means of resistance, charged with causing harm or spreading misinformation, we’ve all started watching what we say. But for language to remain an effective way to communicate intent and meaning, we should consider the reasons — beyond kindness or sensitivity — behind our euphemisms. Some words are brutal for a reason, and sometimes we need to deliver a pure blunt force.

This article originally appeared The New York Times, c.2024.