Nov. 17, 2006 - 16:48 PST

FRANTIC SEMANTICS

Much like an old American at the campfire sending smoke signals being told he must clean up his language, so he begins to fan the flames with a mesh blanket. Present day activity reflected in an editorial in Eugene, Oregon's Register-Guard of today - quoted here in full:

HUNGRY NO MORE

Now you're 'food insecure' -- Feel better ?

Oregon spent a couple of years atop the U.S. Department of Agriculture's list of states with the worst hunger problems. The distinction was so shameful that the state took meaningful action, such as working harder to ensure that qualified people received food stamps. As a result Oregon has moved toward the middle of the pack in terms of its hunger rate -- just in time for the government to drop the word "hunger" from its annual reports."

"Henceforth, people formerly described as hungry will be categorized by the USDA as having "very low food security." Somehow, being he state with the highest proportion of people experiencing very low food security doesn't have quite the sting of being No. 1 in hunger."

"The USDA claims its aim is accuracy. The department doesn't acutally measure hunger, but surveys the number of households that periodically have trouble putting food on the table. That's a yardstick of poverty, not hunger. The kind of hunger the USDA founnd in Oregon is usually the result of expenses such as housing, utilties and medicine having first claim on families food budgets -- by the time people have paid the bills that can't be avoided or postponed, there's no money left over for groceries. Those who make such chouices aren't hungry in the same way as, say, the victims of famine in Ethiopia/"

"The USDA's new terminology, however, has the pupngent aroma of euphemism. Someone who is forced to delay a trip to the supermarket until after the first of the m onth doesn't have food in the house -- and if the USDA would assign a team of researchers to the subject, it would find that not having food is the leading cause of hunger. The word "hunger" may have a different meaning in the United States than elsewhere, but American children wo don't eat breakfast aren't experiencing very low food security. They're going to school hungry."

"If the USDA sticks with its food security label, other goverment agencies will no doubt notice that the department solved the nation's hunger problem with a single semantic switch. The Department of Labor could end poverty in the United States by referring to certain people as income-deficent. Unemployment could become a thing of the past if the jobless were reclassified as people unencumbered by workplace obligations. The homeless ? THey're experiencing a very low level of housing expense. The uninsured ? They're policy free."

"Substituting a bloodless phrase for a word that describesa painful and damaging condition, of course, doesn't make the condition go away. No child ever cries, "Mommy, I have very low food security," the kid is hungry, no mater what the USDA says."

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I don't know, but it seems to me that society in this country as a whole is prone to convert things to more cotton padded terminology. For instance, my pet peeve, allowing myself to be called "handicapped" might allow me to have a card to enable me to park a bit closer to the entrance to the supermarket. But, handicapping is what you do to horses and sports figures. I don't get extra points or points subtracted (if a low score is the aim) like horses and sports figures do and don't get much of anything else either. I am crippled dammit. Can't climb stairs very well, hobble instead of walk, can't do lifting or other labor. I'm not proud to be a cripple, but realize very well that I am one.

We seem, as a society to be bent on calling sow's ears silk purses, but sow's ears only gather sound for the sow.

But it seems to me that euphemisms are just smoke screens hiding actual facts from people who don't want to see the mess.

And this mess in Iraq has coined too many cover-up words to count.

New words, or new uses of old words, do not make facts different - just glosses over them in an effort to hide what actually is.

So, it appears that we all are playing the new game, FRANTIC SEMANTICS. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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