Euphemistically speaking


Several days ago I set aside this post from Pharyngula. Pharyngula is, by the way, rapidly becoming one of my favorite blogs, dealing as it does with evolutionary science and atheism, spiced with left wing politics. What more can you ask?

What brought the Pharyngula post off of the back burner is this AP story that appears in this morning's Hartford Courant, and also in the Day. Both of the articles, in their own way, illustrate the way in which our language is being steadily perverted.

The Pharyngula post makes the point directly:

According to a report released last week in PLoS Biology, when medical journals publish studies about things like antibiotic resistance, they avoid using the "E-word." Instead, antimicrobial resistance is (euphemistically, I suppose) said to "emerge," "arise," or "spread" rather than "evolve."

This decision has consequences, too—popular press descriptions of the work then tend to avoid using the word "evolution", too. This is exactly the kind of run-around that allows kooks like Phil Skell to claim that modern biology doesn't actually need evolution (although, truth be told, Skell is so looney that he claims papers on evolutionary biology that use observations of fossils or gene frequencies don't really need evolutionary theory).

As this post goes on to observe, this type of linguistic camouflage has consequences. While it is understandable that the individual scientists involved may just want to avoid hassles, on a macro level this plays into the fundamentalist drive against science and reason.

The article in the Courant doesn't discuss this linguistic issue. It is, rather, an example of linguistic obfuscation at work. The article reports that over 800 "contractors" have been killed in Iraq, and their deaths often go unreported. The story illustrates how the media becomes complicit with the government when it adopts its terminology when covering a story. (Another example is the use of the term "surge" to describe a permanent increase in troop levels)

In some sense these individuals may be contractors, just as, when I hire a plumber, he is a contractor. But he is, more particularly, a plumber, and that is what I should call him. In this particular case, these individuals are not themselves contractors, they are employees of contractors. But what they really are is mercenaries (Dictionary definition: 1. One who serves or works merely for monetary gain; a hireling; 2. A professional soldier hired for service in a foreign army. Contrast contractor: One that agrees to furnish materials or perform services at a specified price, especially for construction work.)

Calling these mercenaries by their true name would strip them of the legitimacy that the term "contractor" confers. That term is more likely to evoke images of people building schools than carrying guns. It allows the U.S. government to hide yet another brutal, corrupt and pernicious aspect of this imperial war. It is no exaggeration to say that mercenaries have always been the scum of the earth and there's no reason to think these folks are any different.

If these soldiers of fortune were properly denominated, it would be much more difficult for these relatively sympathetic articles to appear. I confess to having no sympathy for these people nor do I think they or their families have a legitimate grievance if their deaths go unremarked. That, after all, is part of the deal. They are paid handsomely for work that our soldiers do for far less. Part of the quid pro quo is the implied agreement that their deaths are off the books. That doesn't mean, of course, that the public should be kept in ignorance of their deaths. They should be properly reported in a timely fashion using proper terminology, and that means ditching the word "contractor".
Posted: Saturday - February 24, 2007 at 09:51 PM          

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