«Negative yield», «room attendant» or «precariat»: hardly a day goes by without us encountering a euphemism for a supposedly unpleasant word. In public euphemisms enjoy great popularity, especially in business and politics. In private they crop up reliably when it comes to taboo subjects. But once the verbal whitewash is exposed, it usually backfires.

Euphemisms lurk everywhere. They’re not a new phenomenon, but probably nearly as old as the first human words. Since time immemorial, euphemisms have served to trivialise or camouflage facts, circumvent offensive subjects and taboos, spare feelings or make unpleasantness more palatable. As we’ve moved into the information age, the spread of euphemisms seems to have accelerated. This development was already predicted by the writer George Orwell in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, where he also coined the appropriate term for it: Newspeak.

Mother tongue of manipulation
While Newspeak in Orwell’s novel is a means for the totalitarian regime to eradicate freedom of thought, the reasons for today’s use of euphemisms are of course far more complex. Euphemistic words aren’t limited to political systems or individual languages but can be found everywhere. What they all have in common is a certain degree of manipulation. While this is usually more pronounced in politics and business and done with calculation, it’s more subtle in private life and often serves to spare feelings. Thus, when talking about death, people prefer to talk about «peacefully falling asleep» rather than dying, termination of pregnancy» instead of abortion, and visiting parents or grandparents in the «senior citizens» residence» rather than an old people’s home.  

The more explicit, the more veiled 
What tends to be the case is that the more explicit the topic is, the more veiled the euphemism. Some of the most hair-raising examples are found in war reporting. There, civilian war victims are often called «collateral damage» or a targeted killing is labelled a «neutralisation» of the enemy. The «concentration camp» gained sad notoriety a long time ago, while torture has famously been referred to as «enhanced interrogation». The world of business and politics, too, sometimes uses euphemisms with eye-rubbing audacity: terms like human capital», «alternative facts» and «socially acceptable job cuts» actually have only one goal: to distract from reality and play down or completely distort the facts.

Whitewashing has short legs
One thing’s for sure: sooner or later whitewashing will be exposed. Or to put it another way, what’s covered up tends to be revealed. Once they’re seen through, euphemisms often say more about the people or organisations that use them instead of calling a spade a spade from the start. So at the end of the day, the use of euphemisms tends to achieve the opposite of what was intended: glossing things over makes them worse, not better. The jug goes to the well until it breaks.