Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"'Obscenities' may be jarring, disturbing, or even revolting at times, but they all speak truth. Sometimes, they speak truth about the matter being described ('Cops give a damn about a negro'). Other times, as with the use of racial epithets, they speak truth about the person speaking. Words like these exist in every human language, though the specific items included often differ. Wherever they are used, though, they bring us back to a primal and visceral reality, one free of whitewashing or window dressing. As such, if they didn't exist, we'd have to invent them.

[...]

"There is another class of words that you don't normally hear about when 'obscenities' come up. Unlike the 'explicit' words declared 'obscene' by conventional wisdom, these words speak no truth. They do their best to conceal it. They are bloodless, heartless evasions that destroy the truth whilst leaving the underlying facts mostly intact (though they are occasionally outright lies). These are the euphemisms.

"Commentators speak of 'the war in Iraq'. The United States 'intervened' in Iraq, they will say, because of 'faulty intelligence'. Regrettably, there has been the odd bit of 'collateral damage' in the midst of what military experts call 'low-intensity conflict' or 'counterinsurgency operations', which often involve 'depopulating' large areas, including 'village closures', in order to 'neutralise insurgents'. This policy of 'shock and awe' 'counterinsurgency' sometimes involves 'civilian contractors', who help in 'the defence of Iraq'.

[...]

"Each of these expressions manages to express an identifiable fact, while totally obliterating the underlying truth.

"[...] 'Collateral damage' does an admirable job of strangling every last bit of humanity out of the concept of dead civilians [...] 'Low-intensity conflict' and 'counterinsurgency' are misdirectors: they focus on the military classification of a series of tactics - in this case, terrorist warfare against a civilian population - while avoiding any actual mention of the tactics themselves. [...] A 'civilian contractor' sounds like a construction worker, someone who is probably involved in the 'reconstruction of Iraq' we keep hearing about; in fact, 'civilian contractor' refers to a member of one of the many mercenary forces - many of which include notorious terrorists and mass murderers - operating with complete impunity as part of the occupation of Iraq.

[...]

"When an employer 'rightsizes' its workforce, it is, of course, 'downsizing' the incomes of employees who will now be lucky to avoid homelessness in the age of 'welfare reform'. [...] 'Mobility' and 'flexibility' are positively connoted, and they aren't precisely lies. [...]

[...]

"If we were not so deeply deluded, we would easily realise that 'shit', 'piss', 'fuck' et al. do not hold a candle in the obscenity department to even the mildest of the above expressions. Each one eliminates unspeakable atrocities and great injustice and suffering from the picture. They seek to anaesthetise mind and conscience alike. They distort the realities that lead people to say 'Fuck tha police' or note that 'cops give a damn about a negro' into the bloodless truthlessness of 'the problems of police-community relations'. They turn crimes for which every one of us should feel deep outrage and shame into neat, tidy abstractions, each syllable a mass grave hiding thousands of bodies. They turn the great sadistic butchers of our time into great visionaries who seek only peace and democracy. The mental operation that turns the mass murder of innocent civilians into 'collateral damage' is not at all far removed from the one that gave us 'special treatment' and 'final solution'.

"No wonder you're not allowed to say 'bullshit'."

-- Élise Hendrick, "Fuck Euphemisms", 'Life After Gonzals' blog, 2007-11-17 [Note that I cut a lot to whittle this down to an almost reasonable size for a quote-of-the-day, skipping over some of the author's other points as a result. I suggest clicking through to read the whole thing organized as it was intended.]