by Ralph Keyes
Fooling around with verbiage is part and parcel of the modern market economy. No one has a more pressing need to make touchy topics discussable than those who have products to sell.
Commerce
To us, a foundation is an organization that gives away money. To our grandmothers, it was an undergarment that nipped and tucked their body’s bulges. In the early 1920s, purveyors of brassieres and corsets had concluded that a softer, vaguer word might help them sell these products, or at least make them easier to advertise. Thus, foundation garments aka foundations. According to the U.S. Patent Office, this term incorporates devices intended to “protect, compress, support, restrain, or alter the configuration of the body torso or a portion thereof, e.g., the female mammae, or those portions of the body lying below the mammae and extending along a line below the abdomen portion of the body to the region of the thighs.”
Today “foundation garments” has a musty, dated sound. The need for their assistance remains, however. For women who might like a little such help but are loath to sound like grandma, body shapers have come to the rescue. Shapewear.
Men’s issues along this line have given birth to gender-appropriate euphemisms. What was once known as a “suspensory” sold better as an athletic supporter, even among nonathletes. In 1897 the Patent Office approved a version of this product that was called a “jock strap.” Symptoms of the fungus tinea cruris that commonly collects in men’s groins was subsequently called “jock-strap itch” by merchants who proposed to cure it. That term was eventually shortened to jock itch in the vernacular.
Products related to the body and its functions cry out for innocuous names. This is especially true when they need to be discussed in advertisements. As ad critic Leslie Savan puts it, “the more scatological the product, the more euphemistic the spot.” Thus “constipation” became irregularity (or, better yet, occasional irregularity) among those who sell laxatives. To deodorant makers, “sweat” was transformed into mere wetness. After Listerine popularized an obscure medical term that blends the Latin halitus (for “breath”) with the Greek osis (for “condition”), halitosis stood in for “bad breath” in its ads. “Ringworm” in the feet (tinea pedis) is another affliction that became easier to talk about when the manufacturers of Absorbine Jr. renamed it athlete’s foot in 1928.
After World War I, a women’s deodorant called Odo-Ro-No recast body odor as BO. This abbreviation did not catch on until Lifebuoy Health Soap began to warn consumers about its dangers a few years later. In ubiquitous radio spots, “Beee-Ohhhh!!” was said sonorously by a deep-throated announcer, to the accompaniment of a foghorn. Customers were warned that BO in thirteen key body areas stood between them and social success. Eradicating BO with Lifebuoy “can help you win friends wherever you go” a magazine ad assured readers. Another ad featured illustrated panels of a driver and his fiancée nearly getting hit by a truck. “Hal didn’t suspect—and Martha didn’t either—that a scare can bring on NERVOUS B.O.” read the accompanying text. This near-crash and ensuing body odor provokes a crisis in their relationship. “Should I speak to Martha?” Hal wonders. “After all, a man expects the girl he’s marrying to be dainty.” Martha herself wonders if she ought to say something about Hal’s BO because “a girl expects the man she’s marrying to be careful.” On the advice of Martha’s mother and Hal’s doctor, both start using Lifebuoy. With BO vanquished, their relationship is saved.
The flourishing personal-care industry that grew up during the past century not only promised to help mask and eliminate body odors but also gave birth to a brave new world of euphemisms. Personal hygiene products such as Lifebuoy promised personal freshness. Menstruating women were offered everyday freshness, sanitary protection, and feminine hygiene. Toilet tissue replaced toilet paper among those selling it. Better yet, bath tissue.
The expansion of commerce during the past century has led to an explosion of newly minted, constantly updated euphemisms in every sphere of the marketplace. Along the way, words have been continually upgraded and degraded. “Cheap,” for example, was originally an abridgement of good cheap, meaning simply “good bargain.” In time, this term took on connotations of poor quality and gave way to euphemisms such as inexpensive and sundry successors: economy, budget, thrifty, frugal, reasonable, affordable, and, especially, value. “We’re not here to sell cheap food,” says a Whole Foods executive, “but we’ve been working hard on our value flank.” Along the way “day-old” baked goods were renamed yesterday’s fresh. “Spoiled” produce became distressed. “Used” merchandise (itself a euphemism for “secondhand”) was now preowned or, better still, vintage. What once were called “junk stores” became thrift shops, then resale stores.
Language manipulation is rampant in the marketplace. Product prices that used to get “raised” are now adjusted. When the term “rebate” became tainted, auto dealers began offering incentives to their customers. IKEA calls out-of-stock merchandise temporarily oversold, including furniture with a synthetic veneer they call birch effect. This is on par with calling products that have no butter in them buttery, and naming ones without any cream crème or krem. As with menu writers, copywriters rely on such pseudospeak for the simple reason that it works. Fancy, euphemistic descriptions help sell merchandise.
In ethnic restaurants, “authentic” is the word of the hour, though never in a restaurant that’s genuinely authentic (i.e., one that caters to customers from the country whose cuisine is being served). In the recurring pattern of a euphemism meaning the opposite of what it euphemizes, “authentic” is far more likely to indicate food dumbed down and cooled off for the popular palate (Mexican, Thai, etc.). When fused with “style,” the authenticity gets diluted even further. A stall at Cincinnati’s Findlay Market sells “authentic-style” tamales. This verbiage is the source of much euphemistic mischief. Think Southern-style (fried chicken), restaurant-style (tortilla chips), Oktoberfest-style (beer), homemade-style (lots of things).
The government sometimes colludes in this verbal hocus-pocus. The U.S. Department of Agriculture allows frozen chicken to be called hard-chilled. With its approval, a certain amount of mechanically separated meat, or MSM— a slurry of marginal meat such as tendons, bone marrow, and a permitted amount of bone bits (“calcium”)—can be included in hot dogs. So can a certain amount of variety meats.
Those who favor sterilizing perishable products with radiation have long bemoaned the unfortunate term “irradiation” used to describe that process. This word brings to mind a green-glowing T-bone steak that could lead to bone rot and hair loss among those who eat it. When approving irradiation in 1985, the Department of Health and Human Services gave it a new name: picowave. This was coined by the head of a company that manufactured irradiators. In order to catch on, however, euphemisms must have some clear relationship to what they’re describing. This one didn’t. A subsequent euphemism, cold pasteurization wasn’t much better, though the Department of Health and Human Services still allows food irradiators to use that term on their products’ labels.
We pay a price for the increasing manipulation of language on behalf of commerce. When our leading purveyor of coffee calls its smallest cup a tall, our grip on reality loosens a bit. It enters an alternate euphemistic universe when Spirit Airlines installs stationary seats on its airplanes and calls them pre-reclined. Questions of propriety also come into play when euphemisms enter the deception zone this way. A hospital that calls a bag of ice thermal therapy and a box of tissues a disposable mucus-recovery system can obfuscate billing and boost its bottom line. (One charged fifteen dollars for the former, eleven dollars for the latter.) Terms such as free, complimentary, and courtesy are little more than euphemisms for “part of the price.” When buying tickets to a baseball game recently, I was charged a convenience fee of four dollars. Whose convenience?
This is the latest twist in commercial euphemization: disguising price hikes as “fees.” That practice has become both ubiquitous and insidious. Banks collect st
iff courtesy overdraft-protection fees for bounced checks. Apparently, bankers are unusually courteous people. When my son’s bank calls him to pitch credit-card offers, they say it’s a courtesy call.
What this really is, of course, is manipulation of customers through creative use of euphemisms. Surcharges with euphemistic names are commonplace. According to Consumer Reports, Americans as a group pay $216 billion a year for surcharges over and above the stated price of products or services. In its polling, the magazine has found that having to pay these fees tops the list of Americans’ everyday complaints, well ahead of tailgaters and dog doo. No wonder. What really sticks in customers’ craws is the shiftiness and indecipherability of names given such surcharges. When a federal tax on Internet service was repealed, some providers began charging a regulatory-cost recovery fee in the same amount. Exactly what that fee covered was never made clear. Then there’s the merchant-function charge, which, according to one utility that includes this on its bills, “reflects certain costs associated with procuring and storing natural gas and electricity, as well as costs incurred by the company related to credit and collections activities and uncollectible accounts.”
Car rental companies are particularly deft at loading up their invoices with hidden charges that have incomprehensibly euphemistic names. A list collected by consumer activist Bob Sullivan includes fees for highway use, peak season, concession recovery, vehicle license recoupment, facility usage, consolidated facility charges, refueling, stadium surcharge, frequent flier miles, and tire and battery recovery. Sullivan posts examples of such “sneaky fees” on his Red Tape Chronicles website. He calls them “anti-coupons.” Sullivan estimates that the average American consumer spends nearly a thousand dollars a year on hidden charges with foggy names, ones few consumers challenge because they can’t even figure out what they’re for (which is exactly the intent).
TERMINOLOGICAL INEXACTITUDES
Early in his political career, Winston Churchill warned fellow members of Parliament about the risk of terminological inexactitudes. In time, Churchill’s phrase became a popular euphemism for “a lie.” Several decades later, Britain’s Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert Armstrong created an uproar by admitting that he’d been “economical with the truth” when testifying in a court case.
Even when straying from the path of honesty, we wouldn’t want to say we’ve become more dishonest. Certainly, we don’t want to admit to telling lies. “Lied is a rough phrase:” wrote Robert Browning, “say he fell from the truth.”
Men in particular avoid giving other men an opportunity to say “You callin’ me a liar?” Once those fatal words are spoken, it’s hard for dialogue to continue without fists being thrown, or worse. Members of the Canadian parliament can shout “Lies!” during debate, but saying “Liar!” is grounds for suspension. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “liar” is “normally a violent expression of moral reprobation, which in polite conversation tends to be avoided.”
No wonder there’s such a great demand for euphemisms in this area, and so many to choose from. Rather than accept lying as a fact of life, we manipulate notions of truth. We massage the truth; we sweeten it; we tell the truth improved. In the course of writing The Dance of Deception, Harriet Lerner asked women friends what lies they’d told recently. This question was generally greeted with silence. When Lerner asked the same friends for examples of “pretending,” they had no problem complying. “I pretended to be out when my friend called,” said one without hesitation.
All manner of creative phrase-making has been devoted to explaining why lies are something else altogether. Instead, those who tell them misspeak. They make bad choices or exercise poor judgment. Swindler-broker Bernard Madoff, whose multiple lies lost billions of dollars for clients who’d trusted him with their investments, later apologized for his “error of judgment.”
As an inspiration for euphemisms, lying rivals copulation and defecation. Those discussing their own departures from honesty can be remarkably inventive. I buffed up the truth a bit. I engaged in a little impression management. You could say I suffer from fictitious disorder syndrome.
In addition to golden oldies such as humbug and credibility gap, consider these synonyms for lies, lying, and liars:
lie (verb): alter, buff, burnish, dissemble, dissimulate, embroider, equivocate, exaggerate, fabricate, fictionalize, inflate, mislead, misrepresent, misstate, prevaricate, puff, reframe, shade, spin, stonewall, trim, whitewash
lie (noun): alternative reality, categorical inaccuracy, counterfactual statement, equivocation, evasion, fabrication, fact-based statement, factually flexible fiction, hyperbole, improved reality, misstatement, plausibly true statement, untruth
liar: [someone who is] creative, disingenuous, imaginative, less than honest, a man of two truths, a serial exaggerator, a trimmer, truth-challenged
Another way to euphemistically refer to liars is to say they’re “in denial” (as was often said of Richard Nixon). This concept is borrowed from psychotherapy, of course, as are a lot of euphemisms for dishonesty. Sexologists William Masters and Virginia Johnson once said that patients who lied “altered their verbal response patterns.” One of my favorite euphemisms for “liar” was coined by a psychiatrist who called a client “someone for whom truth is temporarily unavailable.”
Workplace
A friend I’ll call Angie has worked in management at a Fortune 500 company for more than three decades. Her workplace, she tells me, is rife with euphemisms. They include: not value-added (a waste of time), let’s take this off-line (when a meeting becomes contentious), budget challenge (budget cut), new news (to rationalize a mistaken analysis or forecast), improvement opportunity (performance weakness), and three-rated (a poor performer).
According to Angie, mastering these and other euphemisms is crucial for new hires. “Those who don’t learn to do this quickly do not progress far,” she says. This is true in general, at workplaces of any size. In the TV series Mad Men, an ad executive fires his secretary for, among other things, saying she “covered” for him when he was away from his desk for reasons unknown. “You don’t cover,” he tells her. “You manage expectations.”
The more complex working environments have grown, the more essential euphemisms have become for discourse there. In some workplaces, an employee warned not to dip your pen in the company ink must discern that this refers to having sex with a coworker. When dealing with contracts, it helps to know the difference between a big-boy clause (whose signer affirms awareness of risk) and a bad-boy guarantee (cosigning a risky borrower’s loan). Should the scope of a project expand due to added elements, this expansion is called scope creep by some. Those working on projects that shrink due to budget cuts are forced to engage in value engineering.
The cubicles that their inhabitants call “cubes” were renamed designated work areas by one organization that wanted to upgrade its image. Those working there quickly defeated this purpose by acronymizing them as DWAs. Creating acronyms is a popular office pastime, especially among those who work in information technology. PICNIC is a euphemism used by tech support personnel that means “problem in chair, not in computer.” PEBKAC means pretty much the same thing: “problem exists between keyboard and chair.” This type of problem is called Code 18 by other tech supporters (because its source is 18 inches from the computer monitor, in the user’s head).
A friend of mine who has spent decades toiling in Silicon Valley companies once e-mailed me that he’d just been “onboarded and provisioned” in a new job. What did that mean? Provisioned, Jack explained, meant being provided with a building pass, computer, network access, desk, and directions to the mens’ room. All the essentials. Onboarding referred to orientation of recent hires like him. (“Onboarding session for all new employees at three this afternoon.”) At a company where Jack once worked, he and his fellow cube mates showed up for work one Monday to find their cubicles six inches smaller than they were on Friday. They’d been reconfigured.
That became his coworkers’ sardonic euphemism for any degraded work space: it was reconfigured. At this company, workers given no specific assignment because they were about to be fired were on the beach. (“Wendy’s been on the beach for a few weeks.”) Those under disciplinary action or review were in the penalty box. (“Dave sure got himself in the penalty box when he lost the Figley account.”)
Being familiar with workplace euphemisms is essential not only for workers but also for work seekers. Knowing in advance what type of job you’re applying for can save a lot of headaches down the road. In help-wanted ads, a fast-paced work environment might be one that’s understaffed and filled with frantic, stressed-out employees. Applicants solicited to handle data processing and customer relations will probably be typing and answering the phone. When explicitly gender-based ads were banned in England, euphemistic terms such as attractive replaced “woman” among employers who preferred female employees for certain positions (e.g., “Company president seeks attractive, efficient secretary”).
Some on-the-job euphemisms are relatively common and not that hard to decipher. An ambitious timeline is usually a wildly unrealistic deadline. A rough order of magnitude refers to what used to be called a “back of envelope calculation” (aka a guess). In many offices SWAG, an acronym for “silly wild ass guess,” refers to the same thing. In more than one workplace, unproductive employees are said to be working on the Penske file (after a Seinfeld episode in which George Costanza spends days at a new job fiddling around with “the Penske file”). Then there’s the dreaded learning experience. “When we describe a project as a ‘learning experience,’ ” says one corporate trainer, “we mean ‘disaster.’ You can use tone of voice and emphasis on syllables to convey exactly how much of a disaster it was. Example: ‘How did your project turn out?’ ‘Oh, it was a learning experience.’ ”