Say What You Will – It’s a Euphemism

A euphemism is “the substitution of a mild, indirect or vague term for one considered to be harsh, blunt, or offensive”. Sometimes called doublespeak, a euphemism is a word or phrase which pretends to communicate but doesn’t. It makes the bad seem good, the negative seem positive, the unnatural seem natural, the unpleasant seem attractive, or at least tolerable. It is language which avoids, shifts or denies responsibility. It conceals or prevents thought.

Doublespeak was one of the central themes of George Orwell’s famous novel, 1984, although he didn’t use that term, instead he used the terms “doublethink” and “newspeak”.

Here are some particularly amusing examples, except where downright offensive.

If you are offered a career change or an early retirement opportunity, a career or employee transition, or you are being involuntarily separated, or if personnel is being realigned or there is a surplus reduction in personnel, or the staff is being re-engineered or right sized, or if there is a workforce imbalance correction then: You’re fired!

You aren’t poor, you are economically disadvantaged.

You aren’t broke, you have temporary negative cash flow.

You do not live in a slum but you might live in substandard housing, or in an economically depressed neighborhood, or culturally-deprived environment.

If you are managing company stakeholders, that means you are lobbying, which is really the same as bribing.

When you get an unwanted phone call just as you are sitting down to dinner from a representative of the Republican party (and you are a Democrat) or vice versa, this is called a Courtesy Call. Only courtesy has nothing to do with it, it’s just freaking annoying.

In light of the recent demise of Osama bin Laden, several politicians have stressed that it was the Enhanced Interrogation Methods which caused the informants to squeal and give up the nickname of the courier, which we then followed around until he led us to the compound of OBL. This is one of my personal favorites, not the process it refers to of course, but the absolute ludicrousness of this particular phrase. The ultimate of euphemism. It’s torture, folks! Torture, and you can’t sugarcoat it, and you can’t make it sound nice. Torture.

Since we’ve been involved in two wars for ten years, stuff happens, stuff that we don’t want to happen. When you come into a country and break it, for a variety of good reasons, you might cause some collateral damage, which are really deaths of civilians. Women and children and old people. Accidental death. Accidental – but you can’t quite escape the “death” part.

When a geographical area is neutralized or depopulated that means the CIA killed people, just because.

On a lighter note, intelligent ventilation points, when speaking of a garment are – armholes!

You’re not buying a used car, you are purchasing a pre-enjoyed or pre-loved vehicle.

If you are a bank, bad, crappy debts are non- or under-performing assets.

Ah, genuine imitation leather. That new car smell. But really, it’s cheesy vinyl. 100% virgin cheesy vinyl.

If you want a raise and you deserve a raise, but there’s no money or the company just doesn’t want to do it, you might get an uptitle instead, which is a fancy name for what you already are. Uptitles are fancy job names given in lieu of monetary compensation. An example: Assistant Supervisor of Things Beginning with the Letter “A”.

Watch out if the company you work for says it is levering up, it means they are spending money they don’t have. See “uptitle” above.

If you say you committed terminological inexactitude, or you relayed misinformation, misspoke or were economical with the truth, well that means you just told a whopper. A bold-faced lie.

If you are a politician in Arizona, people who run across the border are illegal aliens, unless they are employing these same people to tend to their children or flower gardens, then they are known as undocumented workers.

We consume adult beverages which are booze drinks, beer and wine and hard stuff. Adults also drink things like water, coffee and tea but these aren’t called adult beverages, just beverages. There’s adult entertainment too, and we know what that means. So attaching the adjective “adult” to a noun, must mean the same as “sleazy” or “bad for you”.

If you get rejected for a job because you are partially proficient, that means you are just plain unqualified. This happens a lot to the middle class, as they attempt to find employment in other areas because the areas in which they used to work no longer exist. See my prior post about corporate buzzwords for the explanation of Outsourcing. But don’t despair because you are probably totally proficient to be a greeter at Wal-Mart.

Here’s the one that really hurts. When you’re called postmenopausal, or mature, or senior – that means you’re old.

What is your favorite euphemism?

Review: Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn by Nell Gavin

Reviewed by Sharon Tillotson

I began this book not knowing what to expect. I’d been wanting to read it ever since being introduced to the story when I met Nell on the Amazon threads and our own Boomer site. Reincarnation is a big theme with me and I purchased the book because it was so highly regarded.

I needn’t have worried. One would have thought the book had been written by a much more seasoned writer than the author. It was beautifully done. The beginning of the book was a long narrative as Anne contemplated her life with Henry from her place in ‘the memories’.  A couple of times it verged on being draggy as Anne played out her emotions, but the emotions and thoughts were so well imagined and wrought that the reader was always pulled back in.

In her ruminations, Anne brings us some colourful vignettes of other lives lived. “And so I am born. I shriek with colic,” she remembers in one, “And then I grow, and Henry grows.” Throughout there are woven in bits of philosophy so skilfully done one hardly notices.  

There were one or two concepts that I did not share with the story, but beliefs are only that after all and Anne’s truths seemed very real in the telling.

Threads is not a quick read. It is a work of literature whose threads are to be savoured and pondered. I truly believe this story could become a classic.

I have only read a handful of books on Kindle thus far and seldom take the time to post a review. For me 5 stars should be reserved for only those treasured books which I would normally have only in hardcover and keep in my small bookcase forever to be re-visited every now and again. This book comes close. I am delighted to so quickly have found such a quality work on Kindle. Threads shall remain archived on my device forever in my ‘Private Library’ collection. A well-deserved 4 ½ stars.  

** A final note: This is such a small thing I hesitate to include it, but because Threads is a book to be contemplated slowly and because I read the story on my Kindle and could not thus simply flip back to find a passage I wanted to revisit, I wished a couple of times that there had been a table of contents, something not commonly done in paper novels but which has become more commonplace and of added value on Kindle.

The Art of Indecision

by Lee Sinclair

While working on my clutter problem, I realized that a lot of the accumulation was caused by indecisiveness.  Whenever I couldn’t decide if I should keep something or get rid of it, I almost always kept it.  And faced with that same choice, I still can’t decide.  I tried reading another clutter book that focused more on the emotional side of the problem.  It didn’t help.  So I began looking for books about decision-making.  But how do you decide which book to read if you haven’t already learned how to make decisions?  I ended up reading three books.

1)  The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar.  This book is mostly about her research on how and why we make the choices we do.  It’s not a practical guide to decision-making, but rather it explores what affects our decisions.  Although there are some conclusions and some ideas on how to apply the knowledge, it wasn’t intended on being a “self-help” book.

Some highlights:  We feel stress if we don’t have choices.  Yet, too many choices or having the responsibility for making a difficult choice creates both stress and indecision.  The ideal number of options is seven, plus or minus two.  When it comes to difficult decisions, choosers felt worse than informed non-choosers, even when the choosers felt they made the right decision. Choices that don’t serve a practical function reflect one’s identity, making them more emotional-based.  Mechanical systems for choosing do not give enough weight to one’s emotions.

Some of the things that affect choice:  *How the information is framed and what is highlighted—losses loom larger than gains.  *Selective memory—we best remember what was most vivid and what was last.  *Confirmation biases—information that supports or justifies our beliefs and actions is more readily accepted.

Practical tips:  Use rules of thumb for easier or less important choices.  Avoid temptation by using distraction or distance.  With complex, multi-part choices, start with the easy choices, narrow by categorizing, and rely on the expertise of others.

2)  Overcoming Indecisiveness: The eight stages of effective decision-making by Theodore Isaac Rubin, M.D.  A practical, self-help approach.  It covers different types of “pseudodecisions,” such as procrastination, impulse moves, and rebellion-type choices.  There’s a lot of material about what blocks or interferes with decisions, everything from perfectionism to having no priorities.  He describes 8 stages of decision-making and ways to break deadlocks.  His list of 20 “secrets” of decision success includes things related to knowing yourself and your priorities, accepting imperfection in the world, and being self-confident.

Some highlights:  True decisions (versus pseudodecisions) produce growth and increase self-esteem.  Inner results (your subjective experience) are what identifies true decision-making.  His Big Fact:  “In very few instances is one decision actually better than another.”  He considers the process of decision-making as “healthy struggle,” one that’s creative and gives you a sense of accomplishment.

Practical Tips:  List options and gather information about them.  Observe your thoughts and feelings about these different options.  Relate options to your established priorities.  Chose one and commit to it, being sure to discard the other options.  Take action.

3)  The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz.  Because I read his book last, it suffered by comparison.  Ironically, one of the chapters is titled “Why Everything Suffers from Comparison.”  The content is very similar to The Art of Choosing, so it felt like a rehash of old information.  He did expand a little on it and also used a different perspective, but it’s difficult to separate out what was new in his book because a lot of it was simply saying the same thing in a different way.  His book is slanted more toward the average consumer, compared to Sheena Iyengar’s more scientific, research-oriented approach.  He also spent the first 44 pages repetitively describing different ways our choices have expanded, which reinforced the impression that there wasn’t much new material in the book.  But reading The Paradox of Choice did help to consolidate and reinforce what I learned from the first two books. 

Some highlights:  He goes into additional details about loss aversion, such as the problem of the “endowment effect”—once you own something, even temporarily, giving it up becomes a “loss.”  Comparison reduces the value of the positive aspects of a choice.  What makes choices particularly difficult are the trade-offs we have to make, fear of potential regret, and lost opportunity costs.  People who try to choose the best are less happy about their choices than people who settle for “good enough.”

Practical Tips:  Examine past decisions to determine how much time and research you put into them and the difference it made in the outcome.  Save your effort for important decisions that actually benefit from it.  Concentrate on choosing what will be “good enough” rather than worrying about missing out on something better.  Think about how you’ll feel about a choice in the long-term rather than the short-term. 

If you wanted to read only one of these books, I would probably recommend The Paradox of Choice for its broader approach, which provides some of the reasons behind our decisions along with some practical application information.  But I like combining the information in the other two books—that is, the background information of what influences our decisions in The Art of Choosing with the practical how-to information in Overcoming Indecisiveness—to get a more comprehensive view of the decision-making process.  Of course, you could do what I did and read all three.  Or there might be an even better book about decision-making out there, somewhere.  Then again, perhaps you should ignore my advice and make up your own mind about which one or ones to read, if any, because I still seem to be having a problem with making decisions.