By Jim Hagarty
Society loves its euphemisms.
They are words that soften things up, I guess. Make life less real, less crude perhaps.
So we don’t have sex – we sleep together. We don’t become bankrupt, we go broke. He wasn’t drunk – he was tipsy. She isn’t rude, she’s plain-spoken. And he isn’t a jerk, of course, just “hard to get to know”, a “little different”, an “acquired taste” or if we are feeling bold that day, we might admit that he could use an “attitude adjustment.” But jerk? Never.
But we save our most delicate words when it comes to the subject of death. Maybe because we’re deathly afraid of death. I don’t know. But people rarely die nowadays. They pass away or pass on and it seems now we can’t even be bothered to add the “away” and the “on” but simply say that so and so has “passed.”
Comedian George Carlin used to have fun with this. He joked that when talking to someone who said he had “lost his father”, he would reply (which I am sure he only did in his mind), “Oh, I’m sure he’ll turn up again.”
When I was in the newspaper business, I kept my eyes peeled (is that a euphemism?) for words meant to substitute for the real words. It became a kind of a thing with me. Therefore, in all the obituaries I ever wrote, not one person ever passed away. I’m afraid to say they all died. And whenever I found weasel words in press releases I would change them to the real thing. In my last few years on a paper, I rewrote many press releases that repeatedly referred to “the McGuinty government”, the premier of our province of Ontario at the time being Dalton McGuinty. As there was no such thing in the entire universe as a “McGuinty government”, I refused to use that term and instead, replaced it with the “Ontario government” of which there is one. Sometimes for variety I used the “Liberal government” but even that was dishonest. There is no such thing as a Liberal government. There is a Liberal party, at least for now, but no Liberal governments anywhere. There are provincial governments and a federal government and in our town, a municipal government, but no Liberal governments.
The mayor of my city of Stratford, Ontario, is Dan Mathieson. Imagine referring to Stratford city council as the “Mathieson government.” Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper did the same thing at the federal level and it pained me to see so many journalists with so little thoughtfulness or backbone quite eagerly referring to the “Harper government” in their stories. For the record, I am here to proclaim that there was not then and never has been a Harper government or even a Conservative government, for that matter. Since its birth in 1867 Canada has only had Canadian governments.
The use and misuse of words, to me, is no small matter. When I taught journalism, I used to tell my students they should liken the words they use to the bullets in the gun of a police officer. Used thoughtlessly, carelessly or maliciously, those bullets – and our words – can cause a lot of harm. The pen is mightier than the sword. That is why when a dictatorship takes over a country, they don’t run around gathering up all the swords right away. The first thing they do is get control of all those words being used out there in the media, the universities and the churches.
I know “passed away” instead of “died” doesn’t cause any harm and never will.
It just sort of bugs me.
(Bugs me, hmmm, let’s see, oh yeah, what I meant to say is it makes me mad and even then, mad is a euphemism for angry.)
I see one of my cats out the kitchen window. Uh oh. I think he might have just “done in” a mouse.
Pretty sure the little rodent has passed.
