We don't fire people in America anymore. We "let them go," as if employment were a balloon we've been gripping too tightly, as if unemployment were a kind of release, a gift even. We don't have poor people—we have "economically disadvantaged populations." We don't surveil citizens—we conduct "enhanced data collection." We didn't torture—we used "enhanced interrogation techniques." The dead civilians of war are "collateral damage." The homeless are "unhoused" or "experiencing homelessness," as if homelessness were a brief weather pattern they're passing through rather than a condition we've constructed through policy and neglect.
There's a pattern here, and it's been building for generations. Watch "shell shock" become "battle fatigue," then "operational exhaustion," then "post-traumatic stress disorder"—each iteration adding syllables and subtracting humanity, burying the screaming truth under layers of clinical distance. The way we name a thing changes how we see it, and more importantly, how we feel about it. And in America, a genius has developed for naming things in ways that prevent us from feeling anything at all.
This is not about political correctness or sensitivity. This is about something older and more corrosive: the American talent for looking directly at violence, inequality, and injustice while describing them in language so soft and passive that they seem like natural phenomena rather than choices made every day.
The Algebra of Evasion
Language should reveal, but American English has increasingly become a tool designed to conceal. A dialect of evasion has emerged, a grammar of the guiltless. Consider the architecture of these phrases:
"Officer-involved shooting" removes the officer from the sentence's subject position. Nobody shot anyone—there was merely a shooting, and an officer was, somehow, involved. The gun discharged. The suspect was struck by bullets. The passive voice is a magic trick: it makes the actor disappear.
The mathematical formula is consistent:
- Remove the subject who acts
- Replace active verbs with passive constructions
- Add abstraction until the human cost becomes invisible
- Repeat until accountability dissolves
"Economically anxious" became the media's favorite explanation for white supremacist violence after the 2016 election. But research from the University of Chicago's Project on Security and Threats found that many participants in events like the January 6th Capitol attack were not economically disadvantaged—they were business owners, white-collar professionals, CEOs. The median income of those charged was significantly above the national average. Economic anxiety had nothing to do with it. But the euphemism did double work: it obscured racism while dignifying it as understandable concern, giving those who needed an explanation other than hatred something comfortable to hold onto.
"Urban" means Black without having to say Black. "Inner city" means the same. "Tough on crime" means something specific about whose bodies will be caged. "States' rights" has always meant the right to oppress. "Heritage" means the desire to celebrate slaveholders without saying you're celebrating slaveholders.
Institutional bureaucracy has perfected its own evasions. "Problematic" has become the word for everything from minor offense to moral catastrophe, flattening all distinction. When universities talk about "engaging stakeholders around equity initiatives," they mean they're having meetings about racism—but the euphemism makes it sound like a management consultation rather than a moral reckoning. Nonprofits "center marginalized voices" instead of saying they're trying to fix their own racism. HR departments conduct "listening sessions" instead of acknowledging they've created hostile environments.
Those who needed these codes built them deliberately. Those who benefit from them maintain them carefully. And the rest of us—we've learned to speak them fluently, often without recognizing we're speaking in code at all.
What History Teaches About Soft Words
The South's planter class called slavery "the peculiar institution," and that word peculiar is doing tremendous work. Peculiar suggests unusual, distinctive, perhaps even charming—the linguistic equivalent of calling a massacre a "misunderstanding." The kidnapping, rape, torture, and forced labor of millions of people became something peculiar rather than what it was: an atrocity, America's original sin still unpaid for.
But here's what matters: the euphemism wasn't decorative. It was structural. If you can't name a thing clearly, you can't think about it clearly. If you can't think about it clearly, you can't act on it clearly. The soft language made possible the hard violence. It still does.
Those who escaped that system and wrote about it didn't use soft language. Frederick Douglass wrote about slavery as slavery, named the slaveholder as slaveholder, the whip as whip, the theft as theft. William Wells Brown documented the rape, the auction blocks, the families torn apart—no euphemism, no softening. Harriet Jacobs wrote about what it meant to hide in an attic for seven years to escape sexual violence from her enslaver. Sojourner Truth spoke plainly about being sold away from her children, about watching her son beaten.
That clarity was radical because it was honest, and that honesty was unbearable to those who needed the lie.
Fast forward. America said "separate but equal" when the architects of Jim Crow meant subjugation. Equal meant unequal. Separate meant second-class citizenship enforced by law and violence. The Supreme Court codified the euphemism in Plessy v. Ferguson, and for sixty years, the soft language enabled the hard segregation.
The Corporate Perfection of Evasion
"Gig economy" makes poverty sound innovative. According to Pew Research, roughly 16% of Americans have earned money through gig platforms. Factor in expenses—gas, vehicle maintenance, insurance, equipment—and many earn below the federal minimum wage. Strip the euphemism: this is sub-minimum wage labor, rebranded. "Sharing economy" makes exploitation sound communal. "Disruption" makes destruction sound like progress.
When workers become "human capital," they're no longer people—they're resources to be managed, optimized, and when necessary, liquidated. When a company says it's "optimizing human capital requirements," it means "we are firing people to increase dividends for people who don't work here." The who—shareholders—and the what—firing—both disappear into abstraction.
The euphemism doesn't just describe a different reality; it creates one.
The Violence of Soft Language
When we say "mass incarceration" instead of "the United States cages 2.3 million people—a rate five times higher for Black Americans than white Americans—many for nonviolent offenses, in conditions that violate human dignity," something changes. The first phrase is a policy problem. The second is a moral crisis. One invites a committee. The other demands immediate action.
Consider what that actually means: five times. Not "disproportionate." Not "overrepresented." Five times. If we're going to talk about clarity, we should use it.
When someone "passes away," that's often kindness, and kindness has its place. But when civilians are "neutralized," when bombing campaigns become "surgical strikes," when napalm becomes "soft ordnance," when the vaporization of human beings is "pacification"—this isn't kindness. This is language built to let people live with what they're doing, words soft enough to enable sleep.
Here's where it gets complex: some language shifts come from genuine attempts at humanization. "Unhoused" instead of "homeless" tries to center the person rather than their condition. "Person-first language" attempts to resist dehumanization. The intent is often good.
But intent doesn't negate effect. If "experiencing homelessness" makes us think of homelessness as a temporary state rather than a policy choice—if the softer language makes us less likely to demand structural change—then the humanizing language may paradoxically enable the dehumanizing system to continue. We become comfortable with the polite terminology. We stop being uncomfortable with the brutal reality.
This is the knife's edge: language that dignifies the individual while obscuring the forces that created their condition.
The question isn't whether the intent is good. The question is: does this language help us see more clearly or less clearly? Does it move us toward action or away from it?
What Clarity Requires
There's a reason certain truths, plainly spoken, make people uncomfortable. The discomfort is the point of euphemism—it creates distance from what should be immediate, protection from what should be felt.
To speak clearly in America is to violate an unspoken rule: thou shalt not make people uncomfortable with the truth. But truth is often uncomfortable. Systems of inequality are maintained by choice, not accident. These aren't inevitabilities—they're decisions, made and remade daily.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. Euphemism is the refusal to face things. It's the elaborate architecture built to look directly at injustice while pretending to see something else.
What Changes When We Speak Clearly
Clarity is not cruelty. Honesty is not hatred. Speaking plainly about difficult things is not the same as giving up on nuance—euphemism is what destroys nuance, flattening everything into comfortable vagueness.
When we say "the criminal justice system is broken," we're being too generous. It's not broken—it's working exactly as designed, producing exactly the outcomes it was built to produce. To say it's broken suggests it was once whole, once just. That's the euphemism doing its work, hiding history, obscuring design, making injustice look like malfunction instead of intention.
Here's what speaking clearly looks like in practice:
Instead of: "The criminal justice system is broken and needs reform."
Say this: "The United States has built a system that cages 2.3 million people—disproportionately poor, disproportionately Black and brown—in conditions we know cause psychological damage, and we maintain this system by choice. We could release most people tomorrow. We don't."
Notice what changes. The first version invites a task force. The second version makes clear that we're talking about active choices, not passive dysfunction. The first suggests we need better management. The second suggests we need to stop doing what we're doing.
That's what clarity does. It removes the hiding places. It makes the choices visible. It turns abstract policy into concrete human reality.
The Cost
What do we lose when we trade precision for politeness? We lose the ability to act decisively. We lose the moral urgency that injustice should provoke. We lose the clarity necessary for change.
Euphemism is a drug. It smooths the rough edges of reality. It lets us discuss terrible things without feeling terrible. It lets us describe a world where nobody is responsible for anything, where harm just happens, where inequality is natural, where suffering is inevitable.
But reality doesn't care what we call it.
The man who was "let go" is still unemployed. The woman who is "experiencing homelessness" is still sleeping in the street. The child in the "underperforming school" is still being denied education. The family destroyed by an "officer-involved shooting" is still burying their dead.
The euphemism doesn't change reality. It just changes how we feel about it. Which means it changes what we're willing to do about it.
This is the cost: language that makes us stupid about our own lives, that prevents us from understanding what we're doing to each other, that protects us from the knowledge we most need.
Naming What We See
The way forward is simple in concept, difficult in practice: say what you mean. Call things by their names. Speak as if clarity matters more than comfort, as if truth matters more than politeness, as if the people suffering from the reality matter more than the people protected by the euphemism.
Love, real love, takes off the masks. It insists on seeing clearly. It refuses the comfortable lie in favor of the uncomfortable truth. This applies to how we love each other and how we love our country—real love doesn't deal in euphemism.
The struggle is to speak clearly in a culture addicted to evasion. To name what we see. To refuse the soft language that makes hard truths disappear.
Euphemism isn't just annoying. It's the difference between a problem we can fix and a tragedy we can only mourn. It's the difference between responsibility and inevitability. It's the difference between a world we make and a world that just happens to us.
We deserve language that reveals rather than conceals, that illuminates rather than obscures, that brings us closer to truth rather than farther from it.
We deserve to call things by their names.
Start tomorrow. Stop saying "let go" when you mean fired. Stop saying "passed away" in contexts where "died" is clearer and truer. Stop accepting "officer-involved shooting" when someone with a badge and a gun shot someone who is now dead. Stop letting "economically anxious" explain away hatred. Stop using "broken system" when you mean "system working exactly as designed to harm specific people."
These aren't small changes. Every time you refuse the comfortable lie, you make the uncomfortable truth a little more visible. Every time you name what you see, you make it harder for others to pretend they don't see it too.
And then, having named them clearly, decide what you're going to do about them.
