When ‘misleading’ means ‘word option’

By Ken Goze

The 44 United Nations weapons inspectors that were held in a parking lot in Bagdad are free. The Bush administration called off its plan to send attack helicopters and warplanes to Saudi Arabia.

There’s a point here, and it’s not about international politics. It’s about a strange and terrible dilution of the English language, the euphemism.

According to Webster’s Unabridged Third New International Dictionary, euphemism is “a polite, tactful or less explicit term used to avoid the direct naming of an often unpleasant, painful or frightening reality.”

Going back to news from Iraq, we notice the helicopters were to be sent to accompany inspectors into areas of “non-permissive forces.”

This makes it sound like the inspectors were dealing with someone from a low-rent escort service that wouldn’t consent to a cheap roll in the sand.

Evidently, the White House felt it would be going too far to say that Iraqi soldiers brandishing machine guns and taking hostages were “hostile.”

This is just one example of the drivel dished out by Pentagon spin doctors during and after the Gulf War and happily snapped up by a gullible press corps.

War has historically been full of euphemism, but the latest conflict elevated this nonsense to new heights.

Astute reporters at those briefings must have felt like picking their feet up, because it started to get deep from the moment Bush ordered “surgically clean strikes.”

By cleansing their speech of all negative and realistic references to war, the administration relieved themselves and the public of the responsibility of thousands of Iraqi military and civilian deaths. To this day, no enemy casualty figures have been released.

We were not bombing Iraq and Kuwait, we were “flying sorties” and “taking out assets.” Rather than killing enemy soldiers, we were “attriting” their forces and “softening up” the Republican Guard. Civilian casualties were “collateral damage.”

All of this makes it sound like we were playing some garish video game rather than waging a war and blowing people into fly bait.

Political correctness has also spawned its share of euphemisms. In a flash of unbridled sensitivity, someone decided that “physically challenged” or “differently abled” should be substituted for persons with disabilities.

While we should place attention on people rather than their disability, these terms are repulsive because they mask reality.

Maybe the PC movement would have us believe that Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer are not deeply disturbed individuals—they’re just “differently perceptive.”

Another word in this category that isn’t really a euphemism is “womyn.” Apparently this wasn’t a typo by some semiliterate publicists for the feminist movement, but rather a deep-seated belief that any visual juxtaposition with “men” is repulsive and unacceptable.

Somebody pull the chrome handle on this garbage while we still have any idea of what we’re talking about.