A Glossary for the Nineties: Chapter 11 - Jargon and euphemism
[Taken from A Glossary for the Nineties, by David Rowan (Prion Books, 1998), based on the column of that name in The Guardian's Weekend magazine through most of the 1990s. © David Rowan]
CHAPTER 11: JARGON AND EUPHEMISM
How to avoid saying what you mean
ACCIDENT n. A word which no longer exists, according to America's national Highway Safety Administration. "Continuation of the use of this word, in lieu of 'crash', works against a public perception of the preventability of injuries and fatalities in the highway environment," according to a memo from its boss. So, very deliberately, accidents will officially no longer happen.
AERODYNAMIC PERSONNEL DECELERATOR n. A parachute, in the latest example of US military gobbledegook. Also beware a vertically deployed anti-personnel device, which might just look like a bomb.
AID-IN-DYING n. One of the new euphemisms for euthanasia, a term far too politically loaded to be used in its own right. Some proponents have been using more elaborate circumlocutions: favourite ones lately include physician-assisted death, and even end-of-life decision-making.
AMBIENT REPLENISHMENT OPPORTUNITY n. A shelf-stacking job - as advertised on the noticeboard at Safeways in Stockport. The most absurdly over-euphemised job title of the decade?
BINOCULAR DEPRIVATION n. euph. How scientists who perform experiments on animals neatly euphemise the sewing closed of cats' eyes, as described in a Wisconsin journal. Vivisection is an emotional issue, and so language has to be designed to hide that. That's why, in the scientists' discourse, animlas are not burned, but "sustain a thermal injury"; and animals given electric shocks, which cry out and try to escape, are (according to the journal Physiology and Behaviour, "react(ing) to adverse stimulation with vigorous motor and vocal response".
BLAM n. acr. The Barrel-Launched Adaptive Munition, a newly developed "smart" bullet that can pursue its target in various directions. A fundamental development: for the military-industrial-jargonisation complex has finally come up with an acronym that's fun.
BUDGET REINFORCEMENT n. Tax. A useful political euphemism, coined by the Swedish finance ministry, which recently announced big cuts in spending and big rises in taxes. Sorry, in budget reinforcements.
CARE, SPECTRUM OF v. What replaced care in the community for mentally ill people as John Major's government realised that programme wasn't proving too popular. So his Health Secretary, Stephen Dorrell, decided radically to change his phrase, sorry, his policy.
CLINICAL OUTCOME INDICATOR n. Your chance of dying in the new, market-led, jargon-heavy National Health Service. It's the term managers use when referring to the numbers of deaths in each hospital. This might hurt a little . . .
CONCERNED WITH THE DRINKS INDUSTRY adj. euph. Drunk. A euphemism invented when the MP George Foulkes was found with a rather high level of alcohol in his blood. Don't call him drunk, implored his lawyer, Stephen Pollard; it was merely that his client was attending a whisky party "as befits an MP concerned with the blending industry". Let's increase our concern with the whisky industry to that, as they say.
DESIGN SIDE EFFECT n. euph. What Bill Gates' technogeeks at Microsoft are allowed to call a defect in company products. Also officially tolerated are the euphemisms that describe systems failures as issues , known issues or intermittent issues, and even as undocumented behaviour. Absolutely not permitted is the word bug, a term a spokesman claims is too "complex" for the company's official language. The company's addiction to euphemism has created a new language called Microspeak, says the New York Times - which may bug a few people in Seattle.
DISINTERMEDIATION n. The decade's ugliest new word: it is an Internet term for the removal of middlemen from an electronic transaction. Without getting tedious, it involves an extranet, a linked network of computers shared between customers and suppliers. Uh-oh, we just got tedious.
DOWNSIZING v. This euphemism does not just mean throwing employees out of work - it also now means throwing Rolos out of packets. It's the current trend towards quietly reducing the size of your chocolate bars. That way they don't seem to be getting more expensive.
EMERGENCY DEPLOYMENT AND READINESS EXERCISE n. mil. A military attack - at least, that's the phrase the US Army used to justify the night-time invasion of Panama that gave General Noriega the chance to listen to a few heavy-metal hits (just a mop-up and stability operation, in the Pentagon's poetic words). That was also the invasion that popularised the timeless phrase, collateral damage. In other words, 400 civilian deaths.
ENABLER n. The hierarchically-challenged person's new role in these post-PC times. A teacher, rather than actively shape students' learning, will enable them to fulfil their potential; museum curators are now enablers who would not dare impart their own impressions to the visitor. And what you are reading now is not a definition, but an enabling mechanism to help you decide what this jargon means.
ENERGY n. euph. As in British Energy - a friendly, safe-sounding concept that appears at first glance to have nothing whatsoever to do with the nuclear industry. Ignore the fact that the phrase "British Energy" might be a replacement term for British Nuclear Fuels: that sort of language has too many bad undertones (remember Windscale?).
ENTERPRISE (WITHOUT HELP) v. tr. What used to be the verb "to leak". That was until the copier company Xerox explained that the untimely appearance of its new digital publishing strategy in the international press was not a leak. It was "enterprised without our help".
EXPERIENCED adj. Second-hand. Stooz Records in New York has been advertising that it stocks "experienced vinyl" - meanwhile a Wisconsin farming newspaper has listed for sale "experienced tractors and combines". Worked it out yet? Yes, more euphemisms for second-hand. See also pre-loved.
FISCAL UNDERACHIEVER n. A poor person, in economists' current jargon. The Plain English people have their eyes on other modern gems, from the hexiform rotatable surface compression unit (a steel nut), to the wooden interdental stimulators that American Airlines passengers are given to pick food from between their teeth, and the customer conveyance mobile lounge. That, of course, is an airport lounge. And, with that, we end this computer-generated verbal conglomeration communications module.
HEADROOM n. What water companies choose to call profits when more direct language might prove embarrassing. The word surfaced before the National Consumer Council reported that domestic bills have in fact risen by 67 per cent since 1989.
HRP n. euph. What used to be called a body bag, until the Pentagon decided that made it sound as if there were actual dead bodies within them. So when Saddam started causing US troops some trouble in Kuwait, it renamed them human remains pouches (as if pouches are just another extension of a soldier's kit), and encouraged the media to use the far less emotive shorthand of HRPs. Human remains are somewhat more difficult, but expect any time now a Pentagon clarification that pouches will henceforth contain surplus operations theatre apparatus...
IMMEDIATE PERMANENT INCAPACITATION n. Another classic from the US Army. This is what the Pentagon warns its soldiers may result from a whiff of nerve gas - that's death to you and me.
INCIDENT n. euph. The transport industry's favourite euphemism. Depending on where you are, it means an Underground train delayed by a pigeon, or a Channel Tunnel train set alight while deep underground. The latter proved a perfect occasion for those who invent euphemisms for a living - and here we celebrate Eurotunnel co-chairman Robert Malpas, who denied when there was a fire on a cross-Channel train that the safety mechanisms had not worked. "I wouldn't say they don't seem to have worked," he told the BBC. "They don't seem to have been applied at the time in the way one might have expected." Clear?
INTER-ENTITY BOUNDARY n. euph. A euphemism the warring parties in former Yugoslavia signed up to - because the folk who drafted the Dayton Agreement could not bring themselves to use that delicate word partition.
INTERGRANULAR STRESS-CORROSION CRACKING n. A harmless-sounding euphemism for something that went wrong in a tube in Oregon, US, and caused a small, er, leak. What kind of tube? Ah. You'll have to ask the Trojan Nuclear Plant for the full details.
LIFE n. An emergent property which manifests itself when physio-chemical systems are organised and interact in particular ways. At least, that's the definition the Archbishop of York, John Habgood, gave at an august conference held by the British Association. Who said the Church is out of touch with the real world?
MEDICAL NURSING STAFF n. The less embarrassing way to refer to NHS managers - as the Government has decided there are too many of them. Again, the solution is ingenious: simply change their "occupation codings".
MILITARY OPERATION n. euph. Whatever Boris Yeltsin wants it to mean. When a Russian commander recently reported clashes in five Chechen villages, Mr Yeltsin insisted that "no military operations had been carried out". So that means the clashes couldn't have happened. All clear?
MISSIONARY TO THE PRE-BORN n. The job-description of the hip anti-abortion, pro-life activist. Currently euphemising the issue wherever abortion politics are getting ugly.
MORPHOGENIC FIELD n. The basis of a new scientific theory, linked, of course, to the quantum gravitational field, which - as you will know - confirms the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan. At least, you will know all this if you have read a recent edition of the cultural-studies journal Social Text, which printed a long paper on it by New York physicist Alan Sokal, full of words like counterhegemonic and transformative hermeneutics. And if that all sounds like a hoax, it was - designed by Sokal to parody the jargon of lit crit, and one which made a laughing stock of the cultural-studies experts who hadn't seemed to notice.
NBC SUIT n. euph. Yet another classic Pentagon euphemism. It might sound like something worn as a guest on an entertaining TV network; it's actually clothing worn in a nuclear, biological and chemical attack. Gee, guys, makes Saddam's threats sound like a fun-loving game show.
NEGATIVE GROSS PROFITn. Loss - as euphemised by Calgene, a genetics company, in a quarterly financial report. That way, shareholders might not be too distressed . . .
NEGATIVELY IMPACTED PROFITABILITY n. A similar euphemism, again designed to hide from shareholders the fact that not all is not necessarily well. This is what Ross Buckland, chief executive of the Unigate group, told shareholders had resulted from one of the company's less successful activities. Could he, by any chance, mean a "loss"?
NON-HEART-BEATING DONOR n. That euphemistic state of health recently described in the British Medical Journal for its heavily jargon-sedated subscribers. Also known as "dead". Why won't anyone call a corpse a corpse any more?
NUCLEAR LEVY n. The tax in your electriticy bill that Michael Heseltine promised would disappear come nuclear privatisation. Except it didn't. So Heseltine explained using the semantics of the euphemiser: "The nuclear element of the levy will cease," he said. "The continuing charge will be to make up arrears." So a levy remained a levy.
PASSENGER FACILITY CHARGE euph. What the city of Austin, Texas, calls the sum of $3 it now demands from every passenger flying through its airport. It would be far too unpopular to call it a tax. Likewise, the state of Minnesota has at a pinch abolished its state unemployment tax. According to the state's Department of Revenue handbook, it now collects a re-employment insurance tax. It's the same tax, but suddenly it's constructive, regenerative, and, well, euphemised.
PRE-DAWN VERTICAL INSERTION n. euph. An airborne invasion of a foreign state - as coined by the US Pentagon when it dropped soldiers into Grenada. No, vicar, nothing to do with that sort of thing.
PRE-ENJOYED adj. euph. Second-hand - one of a collection of recent euphemisms to have emerged. As in the computer advertisement placed by a company called Mad Macs, "where the pre-enjoyed Macs are . . .".
PRE-NEED COUNSELOR (sic) n. Someone who helps you prepare for slumber in eternal repose. A funeral director, in the current jargon.
PREVIOUSLY CARED FOR adj. Another synonym for pre-loved, pre-used, pre-owned or pre-enjoyed: This one was used by a Covent Garden shop to describe second-hand jeans. Presumably these are what one wears while sitting in the pre-driven Cadillacs now for sale across the Atlantic.
REAL-TIME PRECIPITATION SITUATION n. euph. Rain; just as a re-utilisation marketing yard is a junkyard. Both terms are current examples of verbal hyperbole superfluous intrapositioning syndrome, that tendency to invent important-sounding phrases for the most banal aspects of life.
RECEIVE CONTRIBUTIONS v. To sell - at least if you're portraying yourself as a charitable non-capitalist. At the UN Population Conference, the designer headscarves that were on display next to the cash register were not actually for sale. "We don't like to use the word sell," euphemised the elegant vendor. "People make 'voluntary contributions' (ie $30 a scarf)."
RETAIL INSTALLATION n. A shop. It's the current euphemism in places like London's Soho, where entrepreneurs believe themselves to be too trendy merely to encourge shopping.
SIDEWALK COUNSELLING v. How the American anti-abortion lobby now describes its demonstrations outside abortion clinics - intended to "counsel" women to change their minds. As demonstrators' counselling skills stretch to screaming, threatening and intimidating, we can safely assume this is a euphemism.
SITE n. A hospital with no patients. You see, the Health Department has ordered civil servants to "nuance" the closure of hospitals. They must refer to the "closure of 'most of the Bart's site' rather than to the hospital". Feel better?
TACTICALLY ADVANTAGEOUS SITUATION n. What the Bosnian Serbs gained on the hills around Sarajevo during the fighting to controlthe city, according to Cdr Barry Frewer of the UN Protection Force there. Not, you understand, an actual siege. Such language might slow down the diplomatic peace process . . .
TASK COMPLETION WISHFUL THINKING SYNDROME n. jarg. A form of behaviour discovered after five years of research by Dr Dale Griffin of Sussex University. In non-academic language, it means that projects tend to take longer than you expect.
TOY SOLDIER n. euph. A jolly euphemism from the former Yugoslavia used to describe the landmines that are killing and maiming indiscriminately. It was described by the American Dialect Society as the year's "most outrageous new word". The society also had some fun with urban camping - the practice of living in a city as homeless - and food insecure, the term for a nation where starvation is rife.
VOLUNTARY LABOUR n. euph. What the good people of Burma - or Myanmar, as the military regime ruling that country would prefer to have it called - contributed to Visit Myanmar Year. Forget the presence of the odd persuasive rifle in their vicinity; all those workers who were busy building tourist attractions around the country were "contributing their voluntary labour happily", according to the generals' Law and Order Restoration Council.
WELCOME STATION n. euph. A toll booth, according to the powers that be in Salt Lake City, Utah. City hall obviously thinks visitors will come away thinking they've been greeted with open arms when asked to pay $2.25 for the privilege of passing through. Can anyone out-euphemise the Americans?
WET DEPOSITION n. euph. A harmless-sounding euphemism for acid rain - the term employed by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Presumably it offends fewer political sensibilities by making serious pollution sound as gently soothing as a steamed-up window.
WILDLIFE CONSERVATION PARK n. What used to be called a "zoo", a term now considered by the New York Zoological Society to be offensive to animals. It is, after all, defined in dictionaries as "a place marked by rampant confusion and disorder". So the Bronx Zoo is now the Bronx International Wildlife Conservation Park.
CHAPTER 11: JARGON AND EUPHEMISM
How to avoid saying what you mean
ACCIDENT n. A word which no longer exists, according to America's national Highway Safety Administration. "Continuation of the use of this word, in lieu of 'crash', works against a public perception of the preventability of injuries and fatalities in the highway environment," according to a memo from its boss. So, very deliberately, accidents will officially no longer happen.
AERODYNAMIC PERSONNEL DECELERATOR n. A parachute, in the latest example of US military gobbledegook. Also beware a vertically deployed anti-personnel device, which might just look like a bomb.
AID-IN-DYING n. One of the new euphemisms for euthanasia, a term far too politically loaded to be used in its own right. Some proponents have been using more elaborate circumlocutions: favourite ones lately include physician-assisted death, and even end-of-life decision-making.
AMBIENT REPLENISHMENT OPPORTUNITY n. A shelf-stacking job - as advertised on the noticeboard at Safeways in Stockport. The most absurdly over-euphemised job title of the decade?
BINOCULAR DEPRIVATION n. euph. How scientists who perform experiments on animals neatly euphemise the sewing closed of cats' eyes, as described in a Wisconsin journal. Vivisection is an emotional issue, and so language has to be designed to hide that. That's why, in the scientists' discourse, animlas are not burned, but "sustain a thermal injury"; and animals given electric shocks, which cry out and try to escape, are (according to the journal Physiology and Behaviour, "react(ing) to adverse stimulation with vigorous motor and vocal response".
BLAM n. acr. The Barrel-Launched Adaptive Munition, a newly developed "smart" bullet that can pursue its target in various directions. A fundamental development: for the military-industrial-jargonisation complex has finally come up with an acronym that's fun.
BUDGET REINFORCEMENT n. Tax. A useful political euphemism, coined by the Swedish finance ministry, which recently announced big cuts in spending and big rises in taxes. Sorry, in budget reinforcements.
CARE, SPECTRUM OF v. What replaced care in the community for mentally ill people as John Major's government realised that programme wasn't proving too popular. So his Health Secretary, Stephen Dorrell, decided radically to change his phrase, sorry, his policy.
CLINICAL OUTCOME INDICATOR n. Your chance of dying in the new, market-led, jargon-heavy National Health Service. It's the term managers use when referring to the numbers of deaths in each hospital. This might hurt a little . . .
CONCERNED WITH THE DRINKS INDUSTRY adj. euph. Drunk. A euphemism invented when the MP George Foulkes was found with a rather high level of alcohol in his blood. Don't call him drunk, implored his lawyer, Stephen Pollard; it was merely that his client was attending a whisky party "as befits an MP concerned with the blending industry". Let's increase our concern with the whisky industry to that, as they say.
DESIGN SIDE EFFECT n. euph. What Bill Gates' technogeeks at Microsoft are allowed to call a defect in company products. Also officially tolerated are the euphemisms that describe systems failures as issues , known issues or intermittent issues, and even as undocumented behaviour. Absolutely not permitted is the word bug, a term a spokesman claims is too "complex" for the company's official language. The company's addiction to euphemism has created a new language called Microspeak, says the New York Times - which may bug a few people in Seattle.
DISINTERMEDIATION n. The decade's ugliest new word: it is an Internet term for the removal of middlemen from an electronic transaction. Without getting tedious, it involves an extranet, a linked network of computers shared between customers and suppliers. Uh-oh, we just got tedious.
DOWNSIZING v. This euphemism does not just mean throwing employees out of work - it also now means throwing Rolos out of packets. It's the current trend towards quietly reducing the size of your chocolate bars. That way they don't seem to be getting more expensive.
EMERGENCY DEPLOYMENT AND READINESS EXERCISE n. mil. A military attack - at least, that's the phrase the US Army used to justify the night-time invasion of Panama that gave General Noriega the chance to listen to a few heavy-metal hits (just a mop-up and stability operation, in the Pentagon's poetic words). That was also the invasion that popularised the timeless phrase, collateral damage. In other words, 400 civilian deaths.
ENABLER n. The hierarchically-challenged person's new role in these post-PC times. A teacher, rather than actively shape students' learning, will enable them to fulfil their potential; museum curators are now enablers who would not dare impart their own impressions to the visitor. And what you are reading now is not a definition, but an enabling mechanism to help you decide what this jargon means.
ENERGY n. euph. As in British Energy - a friendly, safe-sounding concept that appears at first glance to have nothing whatsoever to do with the nuclear industry. Ignore the fact that the phrase "British Energy" might be a replacement term for British Nuclear Fuels: that sort of language has too many bad undertones (remember Windscale?).
ENTERPRISE (WITHOUT HELP) v. tr. What used to be the verb "to leak". That was until the copier company Xerox explained that the untimely appearance of its new digital publishing strategy in the international press was not a leak. It was "enterprised without our help".
EXPERIENCED adj. Second-hand. Stooz Records in New York has been advertising that it stocks "experienced vinyl" - meanwhile a Wisconsin farming newspaper has listed for sale "experienced tractors and combines". Worked it out yet? Yes, more euphemisms for second-hand. See also pre-loved.
FISCAL UNDERACHIEVER n. A poor person, in economists' current jargon. The Plain English people have their eyes on other modern gems, from the hexiform rotatable surface compression unit (a steel nut), to the wooden interdental stimulators that American Airlines passengers are given to pick food from between their teeth, and the customer conveyance mobile lounge. That, of course, is an airport lounge. And, with that, we end this computer-generated verbal conglomeration communications module.
HEADROOM n. What water companies choose to call profits when more direct language might prove embarrassing. The word surfaced before the National Consumer Council reported that domestic bills have in fact risen by 67 per cent since 1989.
HRP n. euph. What used to be called a body bag, until the Pentagon decided that made it sound as if there were actual dead bodies within them. So when Saddam started causing US troops some trouble in Kuwait, it renamed them human remains pouches (as if pouches are just another extension of a soldier's kit), and encouraged the media to use the far less emotive shorthand of HRPs. Human remains are somewhat more difficult, but expect any time now a Pentagon clarification that pouches will henceforth contain surplus operations theatre apparatus...
IMMEDIATE PERMANENT INCAPACITATION n. Another classic from the US Army. This is what the Pentagon warns its soldiers may result from a whiff of nerve gas - that's death to you and me.
INCIDENT n. euph. The transport industry's favourite euphemism. Depending on where you are, it means an Underground train delayed by a pigeon, or a Channel Tunnel train set alight while deep underground. The latter proved a perfect occasion for those who invent euphemisms for a living - and here we celebrate Eurotunnel co-chairman Robert Malpas, who denied when there was a fire on a cross-Channel train that the safety mechanisms had not worked. "I wouldn't say they don't seem to have worked," he told the BBC. "They don't seem to have been applied at the time in the way one might have expected." Clear?
INTER-ENTITY BOUNDARY n. euph. A euphemism the warring parties in former Yugoslavia signed up to - because the folk who drafted the Dayton Agreement could not bring themselves to use that delicate word partition.
INTERGRANULAR STRESS-CORROSION CRACKING n. A harmless-sounding euphemism for something that went wrong in a tube in Oregon, US, and caused a small, er, leak. What kind of tube? Ah. You'll have to ask the Trojan Nuclear Plant for the full details.
LIFE n. An emergent property which manifests itself when physio-chemical systems are organised and interact in particular ways. At least, that's the definition the Archbishop of York, John Habgood, gave at an august conference held by the British Association. Who said the Church is out of touch with the real world?
MEDICAL NURSING STAFF n. The less embarrassing way to refer to NHS managers - as the Government has decided there are too many of them. Again, the solution is ingenious: simply change their "occupation codings".
MILITARY OPERATION n. euph. Whatever Boris Yeltsin wants it to mean. When a Russian commander recently reported clashes in five Chechen villages, Mr Yeltsin insisted that "no military operations had been carried out". So that means the clashes couldn't have happened. All clear?
MISSIONARY TO THE PRE-BORN n. The job-description of the hip anti-abortion, pro-life activist. Currently euphemising the issue wherever abortion politics are getting ugly.
MORPHOGENIC FIELD n. The basis of a new scientific theory, linked, of course, to the quantum gravitational field, which - as you will know - confirms the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan. At least, you will know all this if you have read a recent edition of the cultural-studies journal Social Text, which printed a long paper on it by New York physicist Alan Sokal, full of words like counterhegemonic and transformative hermeneutics. And if that all sounds like a hoax, it was - designed by Sokal to parody the jargon of lit crit, and one which made a laughing stock of the cultural-studies experts who hadn't seemed to notice.
NBC SUIT n. euph. Yet another classic Pentagon euphemism. It might sound like something worn as a guest on an entertaining TV network; it's actually clothing worn in a nuclear, biological and chemical attack. Gee, guys, makes Saddam's threats sound like a fun-loving game show.
NEGATIVE GROSS PROFITn. Loss - as euphemised by Calgene, a genetics company, in a quarterly financial report. That way, shareholders might not be too distressed . . .
NEGATIVELY IMPACTED PROFITABILITY n. A similar euphemism, again designed to hide from shareholders the fact that not all is not necessarily well. This is what Ross Buckland, chief executive of the Unigate group, told shareholders had resulted from one of the company's less successful activities. Could he, by any chance, mean a "loss"?
NON-HEART-BEATING DONOR n. That euphemistic state of health recently described in the British Medical Journal for its heavily jargon-sedated subscribers. Also known as "dead". Why won't anyone call a corpse a corpse any more?
NUCLEAR LEVY n. The tax in your electriticy bill that Michael Heseltine promised would disappear come nuclear privatisation. Except it didn't. So Heseltine explained using the semantics of the euphemiser: "The nuclear element of the levy will cease," he said. "The continuing charge will be to make up arrears." So a levy remained a levy.
PASSENGER FACILITY CHARGE euph. What the city of Austin, Texas, calls the sum of $3 it now demands from every passenger flying through its airport. It would be far too unpopular to call it a tax. Likewise, the state of Minnesota has at a pinch abolished its state unemployment tax. According to the state's Department of Revenue handbook, it now collects a re-employment insurance tax. It's the same tax, but suddenly it's constructive, regenerative, and, well, euphemised.
PRE-DAWN VERTICAL INSERTION n. euph. An airborne invasion of a foreign state - as coined by the US Pentagon when it dropped soldiers into Grenada. No, vicar, nothing to do with that sort of thing.
PRE-ENJOYED adj. euph. Second-hand - one of a collection of recent euphemisms to have emerged. As in the computer advertisement placed by a company called Mad Macs, "where the pre-enjoyed Macs are . . .".
PRE-NEED COUNSELOR (sic) n. Someone who helps you prepare for slumber in eternal repose. A funeral director, in the current jargon.
PREVIOUSLY CARED FOR adj. Another synonym for pre-loved, pre-used, pre-owned or pre-enjoyed: This one was used by a Covent Garden shop to describe second-hand jeans. Presumably these are what one wears while sitting in the pre-driven Cadillacs now for sale across the Atlantic.
REAL-TIME PRECIPITATION SITUATION n. euph. Rain; just as a re-utilisation marketing yard is a junkyard. Both terms are current examples of verbal hyperbole superfluous intrapositioning syndrome, that tendency to invent important-sounding phrases for the most banal aspects of life.
RECEIVE CONTRIBUTIONS v. To sell - at least if you're portraying yourself as a charitable non-capitalist. At the UN Population Conference, the designer headscarves that were on display next to the cash register were not actually for sale. "We don't like to use the word sell," euphemised the elegant vendor. "People make 'voluntary contributions' (ie $30 a scarf)."
RETAIL INSTALLATION n. A shop. It's the current euphemism in places like London's Soho, where entrepreneurs believe themselves to be too trendy merely to encourge shopping.
SIDEWALK COUNSELLING v. How the American anti-abortion lobby now describes its demonstrations outside abortion clinics - intended to "counsel" women to change their minds. As demonstrators' counselling skills stretch to screaming, threatening and intimidating, we can safely assume this is a euphemism.
SITE n. A hospital with no patients. You see, the Health Department has ordered civil servants to "nuance" the closure of hospitals. They must refer to the "closure of 'most of the Bart's site' rather than to the hospital". Feel better?
TACTICALLY ADVANTAGEOUS SITUATION n. What the Bosnian Serbs gained on the hills around Sarajevo during the fighting to controlthe city, according to Cdr Barry Frewer of the UN Protection Force there. Not, you understand, an actual siege. Such language might slow down the diplomatic peace process . . .
TASK COMPLETION WISHFUL THINKING SYNDROME n. jarg. A form of behaviour discovered after five years of research by Dr Dale Griffin of Sussex University. In non-academic language, it means that projects tend to take longer than you expect.
TOY SOLDIER n. euph. A jolly euphemism from the former Yugoslavia used to describe the landmines that are killing and maiming indiscriminately. It was described by the American Dialect Society as the year's "most outrageous new word". The society also had some fun with urban camping - the practice of living in a city as homeless - and food insecure, the term for a nation where starvation is rife.
VOLUNTARY LABOUR n. euph. What the good people of Burma - or Myanmar, as the military regime ruling that country would prefer to have it called - contributed to Visit Myanmar Year. Forget the presence of the odd persuasive rifle in their vicinity; all those workers who were busy building tourist attractions around the country were "contributing their voluntary labour happily", according to the generals' Law and Order Restoration Council.
WELCOME STATION n. euph. A toll booth, according to the powers that be in Salt Lake City, Utah. City hall obviously thinks visitors will come away thinking they've been greeted with open arms when asked to pay $2.25 for the privilege of passing through. Can anyone out-euphemise the Americans?
WET DEPOSITION n. euph. A harmless-sounding euphemism for acid rain - the term employed by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Presumably it offends fewer political sensibilities by making serious pollution sound as gently soothing as a steamed-up window.
WILDLIFE CONSERVATION PARK n. What used to be called a "zoo", a term now considered by the New York Zoological Society to be offensive to animals. It is, after all, defined in dictionaries as "a place marked by rampant confusion and disorder". So the Bronx Zoo is now the Bronx International Wildlife Conservation Park.
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