"Euphemism" and other euphemisms.

I recently spent five days “in hospital” as the Brits say, enduring two surgeries as well as the plastic trash hospitals call “food.” A friend who has undergone similar procedures warned me when I went in: “If the nurse tells you, ‘This may be uncomfortable,’ understand she means, ‘This will hurt like hell.’”

He was right. The phrase “This may be uncomfortable,” uttered frequently, was inevitably followed by screaming pain. This qualifies the phrase as an example of euphemism, defined by an online dictionary as “a mild, indirect, or vague term for one that is considered harsh, blunt, or offensive.” And it got me to thinking that we as a culture are dying of euphemisms. We are told we’re “being taxed” when in fact we are being robbed by agencies that have no Constitutional right to do the things they do with our money without our consent. We were told during the “pandemic” that we should “lock down” when that actually meant “cut yourself off from your relatives and friends, close your businesses, isolate your kids from their needs, and shut up.”

The very term “euphemism” is a euphemism for lying. Another euphemism for lying popular these days is “embellishing.” The New York Times recently admitted that Joe Biden “embellishes” his tales of youth. The Ice Cream President has claimed at various times to have been raised in a Puerto Rican community (while speaking before Puerto Ricans), and to having attended Schul more often than many of the people in a Jewish community he addressed. Biden even had the audacity to say he’d been arrested as part of a civil rights protest in the ‘60s, when zero evidence supports that claim. These aren’t embellishments, these are grotesque lies made in the act of whoring for votes.

The truth is a tricky thing. Language does not contain it. Truth lives in real-world entities, both material and non-material. It lives in people and animals and trees and mountains and the spirit of freedom and the idea of justice. Language is a mere reporter of the truth, and because reporting depends on the perspective of the reporter, the truth is frequently hidden under verbiage slanted to suit the reporter’s prejudices. It’s the job of all alert and awake (not “woke”) humans to discern when language tells it like it is, versus when it is “engaged in euphemism,” i.e., lying, even if it hurts like hell.