In 1941, Hitler began the mass murder and genocide of all Jewish people within Nazi Germany’s grasp. The orchestrated killings were labeled the Final Solution, a euphemism meant to allow leaders of Germany and its citizens to distance themselves from the horrors that were being conducted under their leadership, blanketing the initial social reception of it.
Euphemisms are phrases used to substitute potentially harmful or triggering words and expressions. Today, they’re egregiously overused — in an analysis of Google Search Trends by Preply, 94% of Americans use euphemisms, and 60% admit to having used them without understanding their meaning.
Euphemisms are a literal way to avoid talking about something, and not talking about big issues only perpetuates them, reinforcing our position as a society with little care about what happens with climate change, world hunger, poverty and war.
In 2020, when 26-year-old Breonna Taylor was brutally shot by members of the Louisville Metro Police in her own home, the use of euphemisms downplayed the urgence for action.
Instead of describing the shooting as it was, some news outlets said Taylor had been killed in an “officer-involved shooting” at an irrelevant “residence.” That language reduced the urgency and initial reception of the incident, but it was later corrected by key news outlets.
In 2013, a sexual abuse scandal at Pennsylvania State University begged the question of why action on the issue didn’t occur faster. A major part of the answer was euphemisms. Issues were reported up the chain of command, but Penn State’s upper management used false interpretations of euphemisms to frame their inaction, with words like “horseplay” and “roughhousing” used to replace terms describing what actually occurred: sexual abuse.
In a way, euphemisms even encourage unethical behavior as the magnitude of the issue is reduced. State corruption and officer bribes are rephrased as “gifts” and “motivation,” and in turn, both issues are undermentioned. To a bystander, a “gift” doesn’t sound as consequential as a “bribe,” even though both qualify as characteristics of corruption.
By replacing topics with slightly less descriptive terms, officials and journalists beat down the true content of the words and reduce the value of the conversation. The argument that euphemisms make concepts easier to talk about disregards the fact that such concepts will still not be discussed on the same level or with the same urgency as without them.
Leaders frequently use them to hide the negative impacts of their policies. In war, generals refer to killings of civilians as collateral damage, whitewashing what has actually occurred.
In office, president Donald Trump has been called out for using inaccurate euphemisms to describe the impacts of his executive decisions. Journalists have struggled with describing these mistruths, though they’re increasingly pointing them out, as they did during the Sept. 11, 2024, presidential debate. Ironically, people on social media are using euphemisms to describe Trump to avoid censorship. He’s been labeled “The Orange Man,” “Tr*mp,” and “The Moldy Cheeto.”
In the technology industry, company owners branded the space where all of one’s data is held as the “cloud,” a fluffy-sounding word used to mask the reality of millions of users’ data being aggregated in one spot where it is too often stolen or misused. The collectors of this data? The innocent-sounding “cookies.”
In the fight against climate change, euphemisms are deeply counterproductive. Descriptions of fossil fuels as their subset of “natural gas” instead of carbon emissions sounds less intimidating and therefore less urgent, though they largely have the same meaning. According to a peer-reviewed study by research specialist Jennifer Carman, Republicans are more likely to act when climate change is referred to as “extreme weather” than as “climate change.”
While these isolated instances of euphemistic language may seem to have a negligible effect, the buildup of smaller euphemisms can have dire consequences, like during Hitler’s Final Solution, when 6 million Jews were killed. While not all euphemisms may seem consequential, the preference is to avoid all usage.
Today, urgent and accurate conversation is necessary to force action. Euphemisms need to become a thing of a past — for the present issues need to be approached directly, without the sugar coating.
