Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms

by Ralph Keyes

  Patagonian toothfish is not the only fish whose stock soared following a strategic renaming. The same thing happened to the popular orange roughy, which was once the unpopular “slime head.” Yesterday’s “muttonfish” has enjoyed far greater success as today’s snapper. What used to be known as “dolphin fish” (no kin to the mammal by the same name) has been successfully reborn as mahi mahi. Tuna is far more popular under that name than it was under its previous name, “horse mackerel.”

  Might Asian carp enjoy the same fate? This big, bony invasive species began driving native species of fish out of American waterways two decades ago. Various remedies have been attempted to address that problem, including construction of electrified underwater barriers. The state of Louisiana, however, has taken a more ingenious approach: enlisting Baton Rouge chef Philippe Parola to come up with tempting ways to prepare this unappealing fish. According to Parola, the deboned flesh of Asian carp resembles a cross between scallop and crabmeat. Parola and Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries realize that the original name of this ugly fish has negative connotations, however. That is why a central part of their strategy is to give the Asian carp a brand-new, more tempting moniker: silver fin.

  Most fish were given their names by fishermen, locals, or scientists who weren’t thinking about how the names would look on a restaurant menu. They just went with fun appellations such as elephant fish, sea squirts, and dogfish. At one time in England, a class of long, eel-type fish was called pintle fish, “pintle” being slang for “penis.” Medieval Frenchmen called one particularly repulsive fish with a dark, puckered mouth cul de cheval, “horse’s ass.”

  You see why renaming certain foods can be so imperative to those who sell them. And it isn’t just living creatures. The same University of Florida group that confirmed Americans’ aversion to goat meat also found negative associations with the muscadine grape based on its name alone. Foods made with soy products sell better when the word “soy” is not prominent on the label. Other fruits and vegetables with similar problems have been given successful verbal makeovers. Sales of what used to be called the Chinese gooseberry took off when it was renamed kiwifruit— after the flightless bird that is New Zealand’s national symbol—by a produce exporter, half a century ago. (An earlier attempt to rename it melonette was fruitless.) The lowly cremini mushroom, beloved by few in a large form that used to be discarded, became a bestseller when reintroduced as portobello or portabella. If you want to get technical, mushroom is a euphemism for a species of fungus called Agaricus bisporus.

  When the unfortunately named rapeseed oil had trouble competing with products that had nicer names, a Canadian strain low in saturated fat was dubbed Canola (i.e., “Canadian oil”) in 1978 and has done rather well since. Incidentally, the “rape” in rapeseed oil has nothing to do with sexual assault. It is a linguistic anomaly based on the Latin term rapum for “turnip,” a relative of rapeseed.

  Many of today’s food-based euphemisms are the result of emerging health concerns. An organic sweetener sold as an alternative to white sugar is dubbed evaporated cane juice. This sugarcane product is somewhat less refined than the kind we usually put on our Rice Krispies, but it is sugar nonetheless, even if that word appears nowhere in its name. Turbinado is another less-refined sugarcane product with a name that obscures its origins.

  As with euphemisms in general, those involving food reflect social changes. Today, they emerge primarily from fertile brains in corporate marketing departments. One market study confirmed how much antipathy there was to the name and notion of prunes. As a result, the California Prune Board petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to allow them to relabel their product dried plums. “If you call a dried plum a dried plum instead of calling it a prune, it sells better,” Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) argued in a letter to the FDA. “So I’m all for that. I think we’re talking about jobs, we’re talking about all kinds of good things that can happen once we can sell this product as a dried plum.”

  Although it approved the name change, the FDA disallowed “Dried Plum Juice” on the basis that the term was rather oxymoronic. The California Prune Board then reintroduced itself as the California Dried Plum Board. Ketchum, a public relations firm it hired, created a dried plum team that courted media coverage with all the intensity and inventiveness of political strategists. Members of a Ketchum “war room” bombarded the press with news releases, satellite feeds, sound bites, slogans, and Internet posts calling attention to this fruit’s new name. Ketchumites called their campaign the “Federal Witness Reidentification Program.” Sales of prunes/dried plums in the United States were soon up over 5 percent.

  As the dried plum/prune saga shows, in the modern era, renaming foods is often a matter of carefully researched euphemizing. This illustrates the penchant for renaming engaged in by merchants who long ago replaced shamans and priests as our primary suppliers of euphemisms. For those with something to sell, effective renaming can result in higher profits. More revenue. A better bottom line. These are just a few of the euphemistic ways they, and we, refer to one of our deepest sources of anxiety: money.

  8

  Show Me the Liquidity

  WHEN THE EDITORS of a collection of personal essays about money had trouble recruiting contributors, they approached a man who’d already written about his drug addiction and nervous breakdown. Surely this author would have no difficulty writing about money. He did. The writer begged off, confessing that there was no way he could discuss the subject candidly.

  He is not alone. Money is one of our most taboo topics. I know many more people who will tell me about their sex lives, their loneliness, or their fear of dying than will reveal how much they earn, own, and owe. Therapists commonly find that nothing is harder for patients to talk about than money. In a survey of women’s attitudes, Ms. magazine discovered that those polled considered money “the ultimate intimacy,” more difficult to deal with openly than sex.

  When human beings were more self-sufficient and their commerce was based on barter more than on cash, there was little demand for money-based euphemisms. If trade consisted of exchanging ten ears of corn for two loaves of bread, what need was there to euphemize? As the cash economy grew, there was every reason. When financial transactions became central to life in general, money became the measure of one’s worth—in many senses of the word. If having enough money could make you feel more worthwhile, an understandable fear of having too little could make you feel less worthwhile, worthless even. Alternatively, in an egalitarian context, having too much money can feel embarrassing. Therapists have a word for anxiety about being too rich: “affluenza.” When in college, my son found that even his wealthiest classmates called themselves “upper middle class.”

  In some African societies, the number of cows owned is a measure of social standing. Among the Saami (Lapps), it’s reindeer. To us, cash is the primary yardstick measuring where we stand. In a society that’s prone to use wealth as a sign of personal value, making our financial status public tells the world a lot about who we think we are. Too much, perhaps. How could this topic make us anything but anxious? In the financial realm, no less than any other, anxiety is the primary incubator of evasive language.

  Money Talks

  Money has long been a popular source of slang that allowed us to avoid using the m-word: bread, dough, moolah, scratch. Now, we’re just as likely to use euphemistic synonyms: funds, finances, resources, currency. Those who don’t have enough money are financially insecure. They have limited means. They’re a little short. When my son tells me about a friend who’s strapped, he says she’s under budget constraint.

  In past eras, money wasn’t as rich a source of euphemisms for the simple reason that there wasn’t enough of it around to merit verbal evasion. Once there was, and once we discovered how uncomfortable this topic made us, euphemisms flowered. “Money management” became wealth management. “Income” became revenue. “Wages” were transformed into salaries, then compensa
tion or remuneration. Those doing shortterm work received stipends. College professors who wouldn’t be so crass as to expect payment for making a presentation were happy to accept honorariums, preferably ones that included a per diem. Once again, euphemisms were put to work on behalf of gentility.

  Like any euphemisms worth their salt, the ones we use for money soften blunt terms that once were common. You’re no longer “tapped out”; you simply have cash-flow problems. Business losses have become little more than revenue deficiencies or revenue gaps. Those who used to “go bankrupt” now file for Chapter 11 or Chapter 13. They aren’t “broke”; they’re insolvent. Their ledger books show negative net worth due to downward adjustment.

  As money, commerce, and the workplace have crept in to so many aspects of contemporary life, so have associated euphemisms. These euphemisms have proved very handy not just for masking anxieties but also for surrounding our financial transactions with verbal fog. Who wouldn’t prefer to leverage a major purchase than “go deeply in debt” to do so? When New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman argued that automakers should have “limits on the leverage they can amass,” I believe he meant that they should not be allowed to take on too much debt. Those who do this may have to deleverage. I’m old enough to remember when that was known as “paying off loans.”

  The modern economy is rife with this type of verbal camouflage. I recently read about a new business that was said to be in start-up mode (i.e., it had no customers). Its owners were in a pre-revenue state. They were experiencing a shortfall. Or, as the president of a struggling college once reported, its financial standing had some soft spots.

  Those who write annual reports are masters of this type of doublespeak. These reports brim with euphemistic language such as a challenging economic environment (recession), nonperforming assets (bad loans), and downward adjustment (losses). Bad investments are nonstrategic or long-term buys (i.e., they might pan out over time, but don’t bet on it). Strategic reviews are under way. Unforeseen events had a negative impact on earnings (they suffered a loss). Profitability was reduced (more losses). Companies then endure substantial write-offs (big losses). In a classic oxymoron, these firms suffer negative growth (they shrink).

  The peculiar nomenclature of modern finance has become so pervasive that it’s easy to overlook its euphemistic roots. Such manipulation of language goes beyond easing discomfort with soothing words. In some cases, it leaps from benign face-saving into a realm where wrongdoing is facilitated by verbal flimflam. In this sphere, brokers who pad their commissions by unnecessarily buying and selling stocks are said to be churning, as if they were making financial butter. What’s “price-fixing” to you is parallel pricing to executives who engage in this illegal practice. Those who buy troubled companies and strip out valuable resources unbundle them. At one time, this involved leveraged buyouts (i.e., assuming massive debt to purchase a company that then becomes liable for the debt). When this practice was given a bad name by the likes of Michael Milken and Gordon Gekko, those doing it relabeled their companies private equity firms and continued to borrow money to buy businesses they could bleed of resources before reselling them.

  Such verbal dodges make shady practices sound positively sunny. There are many more. Corporate spying might be called competitive intelligence gathering and is. Copying someone else’s product is reverse engineering. Even those guilty of actual malfeasance can hide behind a curtain of euphemisms such as double-entry bookkeeping and creative accounting. An acknowledgment of fraudulent accounting consists of a mere restatement of earnings. A bribe given or taken goes by many names: commission, consideration, contribution, consultant’s fee, donation, gift, incentive, inducement, or rebate. The bribed party was taken care of.

  Even victims of misconduct rely on euphemisms to avoid admitting their plight. Businesses that don’t like to talk about shoplifting and employee theft call this problem inventory shrinkage (shrink for short: “Our shrink is down from last year”). Those who try to catch shoplifters, yesterday’s “store detectives” and “floorwalkers,” are today’s loss-prevention specialists. They engage in corporate-asset protection. Stolen goods are temporarily displaced inventory. After being robbed, one bank posted the loss on its books as an unauthorized withdrawal.

  Such euphemisms don’t just save face; they hide financial fragility. Only when an economy collapses do we realize how many euphemisms helped pave the way for dubious transactions.

  Hard Times

  What we used to call hard times provide a hothouse of evasive terms that camouflage what’s actually going on. Softening of the economy is one of my favorites. When the Dow Jones Industrial Average sank 508 points on October 19, 1987, nearly 23 percent of its total value, some called this calamitous event an equity retreat.

  A century and more ago, stock market crashes were called “panics.” Since the word “panic” itself may have contributed to the fear that fueled such events, it was replaced with depression. This was thought to be a less ominous synonym. After the Great Depression took care of that one, recession was conjured as an alternative, at least for milder economic retreats. When recession took on negative connotations of its own, we resorted to slump, slowdown, or—most popular of all—downturn (George W. Bush’s preferred euphemism for the economic crisis that commenced in his second term).

  Correction has proved to be a durable euphemism for economic reversals since the New York Times began using the word that way during the early 1950s. Thereafter, a declining stock market was one being corrected, like a second grader’s homework. Markets of all kinds went through corrections. This term has an aura of normality, a sense that mere adjustment is going on, not only anticipated but healthy. As millions of homeowners began losing their houses to foreclosure, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson blandly referred to the housing correction he saw under way, one that would puncture the artificial bubble it was based on.

  That bubble came to be, in part, because of the ease of borrowing money using homes as collateral. If the house was already mortgaged, such borrowing would call for a second mortgage. That term became passé, however, and for good reason. “Second mortgage” sounds forbidding, like an added ball and chain. Accessing home equity, on the other hand—tapping it, putting it to work— sounds like discovering diamonds in your backyard and was perceived this way by millions of homeowners. They monetized their assets.

  Banks began to market home loans aggressively in the 1980s, using soothing terminology devised by copywriters they hired away from product manufacturers. Those who might not qualify due to a bad credit history were upgraded to having less-than-perfect credit. This phrase was used to describe high-risk homebuyers who were then offered subprime loans. Unlike, say, “junk bonds,” the term “subprime loan” in no way reflected the riskiness of that type of credit. The fact that high-risk loans were now broadly called loan products or financial products helped make them easier to sell. A product sounds tangible, like a bagel, say, or a bicycle. Many loan products were mortgages that had been carved into tranches (Franco-financial for “slices”), then bundled into collaterized debt obligations (CDOs). These loans were said to be securitized. This had a reassuring sound. Something that’s securitized is secure, right? Wrong. Bundling risky loans with safe ones to make them safer was like combining E. coli–infected ground meat with a clean batch in hopes that the clean batch would purify the contaminated one.

  “Risk” itself was a word seldom heard in the process, though downside potential did sometimes get mentioned. When, despite all the swaps, securitizing, and collateralizing going on, many of these debts proved to be uncollectible, what used to be called “bad loans” were converted verbally into illiquid assets. The subsequent drying up of credit became a liquidity crisis.

  The economic collapse that got under way in 2007 was like a short course in an esoteric vocabulary camouflaging the financial monkeyshines involved. If such terms put you to sleep, that was exactly the point. They’d done their job.


  Cagey, jargony euphemisms were integral to the boom that led to the bust of 2008. Arcane verbal evasions helped keep what was actually going on hidden behind a euphemistic curtain. It might be something of a stretch to say that evasive language facilitated the financial shenanigans we’ve witnessed in recent years, but only somewhat. Calling dubious loans made to bad credit risks subprime loans certainly helped bankers make them. Didn’t they know better?

  Of course they did.

  Among themselves, those who engaged in financial double-talk used starkly different terminology. In-house, vague euphemisms gave way to vivid slang. At the peak of the lending binge, mortgage brokers talked cynically of the “liar loans” they knowingly made to borrowers who faked their creditworthiness. At an extreme were “ninja loans,” an acronym for loans offered to those with no income, no job or assets. Such insider lingo was far more colorful, blunt, and candid than the deceptive euphemisms foisted on outsiders. Haircut transactions were ones with reduced profit. A clawback process was one in which excess payments were retrieved from the party to whom they’d been made. Cramdown settlements were ones crammed down creditors’ throats by judges. Their insolvent customers were upside down. Those who owed more on a mortgage than their property was worth were underwater. A rapidly declining asset was a falling knife. Zombie banks were ones with insufficient assets that continued to do business anyway. Perhaps more public use of such candid terms might have helped avoid some of the worst excesses whose skids were greased by misleading euphemisms.