Sanitized Words

Trey Smith

"Targeted killing" has become the euphemism du jour. Remember "harsh interrogation"? The conduct discussed in the killing memo was once simply referred to as assassination.

More and more people are pushing back against the policy. They are reacting, no doubt, to the fact that President Obama has authorized many times the killings that President Bush did.
~ from Why Obama's 'Targeted Killing' is Worse than Bush's Torture by Mary Ellen O'Connell ~

As George Orwell so eloquently showed, one of the chief tasks of modern government is to make bad things seem far more palatable. When words are used that make the people squeamish, then they often object to whatever it is the government desperately wants to do. So, benign euphemisms are created to lull the public to sleep and, as we all should know, it tends to work like a charm!

As I have written about before, one of the euphemisms that irritates me to no end is the now-accepted usage of the term, Improvised Explosive Device (IED). In the days of yore, we used a much simpler word for an IED; we called it a bomb. Everyone knew that bombs can be deadly. They blow people up and apart. If you happen to be in the vicinity of where a bomb detonates, chances are great that either you will be killed or severely injured.

Using the term Improvised Explosive Device sounds more like a science fair project your 16 year old son or daughter might dream up. Even worse, since the term itself is rarely used anymore, all we hear is IED. A good deal of the time I suspect that most people no longer comprehend what the letters stand for. It becomes that much easier to read a story which references an IED and not to grasp fully that it likely involves dismembered body parts.

Another insidious term along these same lines is the oft used collateral damage. It sounds like something you might say when talking about a fender-bender your next door neighborhood was involved in recently. "You know, the front of Jack's car doesn't look so good, but not as bad as Mrs. Ferndale's front lawn! She sustained some collateral damage, if you know what I mean?"

But the truth behind collateral damage is no laughing matter! This euphemism means the death and/or injury of innocent bystanders, whether by accident or callous disregard. While it can be applied to one solitary individual, it's usually uttered in reference to the deaths and/or injuries of a number of people; people just like you and I who were going about their daily affairs and then -- poof! -- they were no longer going about anything at all!

And now, we can add to the list "targeted killing." This euphemism confers a certain air of precision AND legitimacy. Why would our government target people to be killed UNLESS they deserved it? They certainly wouldn't target innocent people, so the people they DO target must be really, really b-a-d.

Some of them MAY be bad and some of them may not. Since all "targeted killing" really represents is a sanitized form of the word assassination, we should refresh ourselves of what the definition of assassination is. To wit, "To murder (a prominent person) by surprise attack, as for political reasons."

Ooh, but murder has such a bad ring to it. It sounds illegal. It's the kind of action that lands many people in prison and some on death row. And to admit that you're killing people for political reasons doesn't sound very legitimate either. Isn't that what despots and authoritarian regimes do? Don't we criticize them when they assassinate people?