My America ， 描述： by Ed Anger

kingjames

A RED, FRAGRANT FLOWER BY ANY OTHER NAME
I’m madder than kids stuck in summer school because — well, folks, society assumes we’re all idiots. It assumes they can dress up hamburger by calling it filet mignon.

I’ve heard two phrases in the last couple days that made my ears hurt. An airline commercial was yakking on about a ‘travel experience’ instead of a ‘flight,’ while a financial advisor on a talk show was gabbing about ‘negative cash flow’ instead of what we amateurs call it: ‘losing money.’

Folks, when did it become necessary to replace perfectly serviceable words with a few that dress the situation up without adding a damn thing? When did ‘rain’ become a ‘precipitation event,’ which I heard on the news a couple of weeks back?

Naturally, I’m going to answer my own question! It started off as politically sensitive job descriptions in the 1980s — ‘custodial engineer’ instead of ‘janitor,’ ‘flight attendant’ instead of ‘stewardess,’ and the comedic ‘domestic goddess’ instead of ‘housewife.’ These were created to give added dignity and psychological upgrades to professions that were not exactly Ph.D. level but were important to the smooth functioning of our society.

Along with that, we got the gender non-specific ‘firefighters’ instead of ‘firemen’ and ‘waitstaff’ instead of ‘waiters and waitresses.’ I don’t have a problem with ‘manholes’ being called ‘utility holes’ or police ‘snipers’ who prefer ‘sharpshooters.’ Real estate agents stopped selling ‘houses’ (which were mere structures) and are now selling ‘homes’ (the place where dreams and families are made).

I get all of that.

I honor the wishes of people who prefer African-American to the names I once knew (‘black’ or ‘Afro-American’), or men and women who would rather be called Latino instead of ‘Hispanic.’ All of that makes sense. What I don’t get is who decided that everything should come wrapped in high-falutin’ verbiage? Again, let me answer my own question. I blame two groups. First, the sociologists and psychologists who decided that no one should have their feelings hurt, or that something should be made to sound less bad than it really is. We’re told that it’s damaging to say that someone is ‘uneducated,’ so now they simply ‘lack a formal education.’ People don’t ‘die,’ they ‘pass away.’ The homeless ‘live outside the circle of architecture.’ (No, I’m not kidding.) Second, I blame the attorneys and insurance agents (sorry, ‘insurance product portfolio professionals’) who insisted that every statement have qualifiers to avoid potential lawsuits. Apparently, someone who is caught on video holding up a store is still an ‘alleged’ robber. How long, I wonder, before ‘robber’ becomes ‘unauthorized borrower’? We’re no longer speaking in words. We’re spouting dictionary definitions.

The caution in our language is helping to kill us slowly. Instead of learning to communicate, we’re learning to obfuscate. Instead of doing what we did in the 1960s, we’re ‘expressing the way it may be or the way someone wishes it could be, so they don’t sue us or suffer psychological impairment.’

I liked it better when it was ‘telling it like it is.’