There was a time when we called things by their names. Grief was grief, not “emotional processing.” War was war, not “kinetic military action.” Death was death, not “negative patient care outcome.” I remember overhearing my grandfather at a funeral once, muttering under his breath as the minister tiptoed around the word “dead.” He leaned close and whispered, “The dear man died. Say so.”
It wasn’t callousness, but reverence for clarity. For him, truth-telling was a kind of moral hygiene. And now, years later, I wonder if that clarity has not slipped from our tongues entirely.
We live in an age of euphemism. It slithers into our speech under the guise of diplomacy, branding, or political correctness. But somewhere along the line, it ceased to be about kindness and became instead a way to avoid accountability. To soften uncomfortable truths not for the sake of others, but for the preservation of self or institution. Language, once a bridge between inner truth and outer witness, now often serves as a smokescreen.
Euphemism is not inherently evil. There is mercy in tempering blunt speech. There are times when the rough edge of truth needs sanding. But when we habitually reach for vagueness, when our vocabulary becomes populated with hollow substitutes, we risk something greater than miscommunication—we risk unmooring ourselves from the real.
Take public discourse: politicians speak of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” corporations announce “resource realignment strategies,” and school boards debate “challenging content exposure protocols.” What any honest soul would call torture, layoffs, or book bans, we now reframe to obscure their human cost. The stakes here are not merely semantic, they are moral.
Language has always shaped moral perception. George Orwell knew this well when he wrote of “Newspeak,” a language designed not to communicate, but to constrain thought. We are not there yet. But if we are not careful, we may find ourselves speaking fluently in a tongue that no longer knows how to say anything true.
There is also a personal dimension. In our daily lives, euphemism creeps into the way we talk about loss, illness, and conflict. We say someone “passed” rather than died, that a marriage is “complicated” rather than broken, that we are “working through some things” rather than hurting. Sometimes, this is grace. But sometimes, it is a refusal to name our pain.
And if we cannot name our pain, how shall we heal? If we cannot call out injustice clearly, how shall we resist it?
To recover the integrity of our words, we must return to the ancient habit of truth-telling. This does not mean we must always speak harshly or with brutal honesty. Rather, it means we learn again how to speak precisely and courageously. How to distinguish between gentleness and evasion, between kindness and complicity.
We can begin with the language closest to our lives. When we grieve, let us say, “I am grieving.” When we make a mistake, let us not say, “It was a lapse in communication,” but “I was wrong.” When we see violence, let us name it plainly, even when cloaked in the garb of law or bureaucracy.
We must also recover the public commons of language, those shared words and truths that tether us to each other. This means resisting jargon and spin, resisting the marketing impulse to prettify what is broken. It means speaking of people as people, not demographics or metrics. It means letting our words bear weight again.
There is courage in naming. There is dignity in calling things what they are. And there is a kind of sacred trust we violate when we manipulate language to evade truth.
The slippery tongue, though it may be socially acceptable, cannot guide us through the moral wilderness of our time. For that, we need a steadier voice, one anchored in honesty, humility, and compassion.
So let us speak with clarity. Let us reclaim the moral weight of words. Let us refuse the refuge of euphemism when it hides injustice, and instead use language to illuminate, to witness, to heal.
This week, notice the euphemisms in your own speech and in the public sphere. Choose one moment each day to speak plainly where you might have evaded. Practice the discipline of naming with care. Let your words be a small defiance against the fog of avoidance, and a step toward a language that serves truth.
