Our government recently reported performing a “double tap” in September on a boat suspected of transporting drugs in the Caribbean.
This was some tap – two missile strikes that instantly killed nine men and then blew apart two survivors clinging to the wreckage.
So there, in the words of “War” Secretary Pete Hegseth, we have the deployment not only of missiles, but also of that classic grammatical camouflage, the euphemism.
While the military is hardly alone in using words that disguise unpleasant reality, its efforts are adroit.
Thus we have collateral damage for civilian killings, strategic withdrawal for retreat, surgical strike for precision bombing, and enhanced interrogation for torture.
But now comes Hegseth with double tap – a term for rapidly firing a gun twice – that seemed grotesquely twisted when applied to the killings without trials.
As well, though, euphemism is rampant among civilians. And who can blame us? Life is full of body blows and awkward moments that are softened by linguistic cloaking.
Author Ralph Keyes, who wrote a book on the subject, said, “Using euphemisms is the verbal equivalent of draping nude statues. Doing so substitutes unthreatening words for ones that make us fidget.”
Or, as English raconteur Quentin Crisp put it, “Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.”
One of our most hard-working euphemisms can be found daily in family-written newspaper obituaries, where “passed away” softens the sorrowful truth that a loved one has, well… died.
And back in the day, a lady excused herself when nature called by announcing, “I have to powder my nose.” In similar circumstance, my late father always declared, “I have to see a man about a horse.”
In the world of euphemism, being fired is being let go; second-hand is pre-owned; lies are alternative facts; old folks are senior citizens, and sleeping together is, well, no translation needed. Nor need we closely examine the true meaning of friends with benefits.
For the dullards among us we have not the sharpest tool in the shed; for the poor, economically disadvantaged; for the sick, under the weather; and for the overly demonstrative, wardrobe malfunction.
But aside from its kindness in softening hard truths for us, the euphemism can as easily be used to obfuscate the truths we need to know.
The Korean “Conflict” was called that because there was never a formal declaration of war, even though some 36,000 American troops died in fighting what our government termed a “police action.”
Not to mention that young people we send off to war are sometimes dehumanized as boots on the ground.
The late comedian George Carlin, who had a knack for getting to the point, noted that the condition once known as shell shock or battle fatigue gradually morphed into post-traumatic stress disorder. That, he said, is the kind of language “that takes the life out of life.”
Carlin railed against toilet paper becoming bathroom tissue, sneakers becoming running shoes, false teeth becoming dental appliances, house trailers becoming mobile homes, and constipation becoming “occasional irregularity.”
Euphemism has also drawn suspicion from those who closely observe the language of autocracy, as did the provocative author George Orwell, who gave us both Animal Farm and 1984.
With every American “tap” on South American boats, we might heed Orwell, who warned in words now pertinent to our own time, that the euphemism can “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”
Gerry Goldstein (gerryg76@verizon.net ), a frequent contributor, is a retired Providence Journal editor and columnist