Society Is Challenged By Growing Use Of Gibberish

There’s a scourge in our society that gets worse with each passing day. The affliction about which I write is politically correct speech, also known as the language of cowards.

For the most part, this is based on a simple premise that involves taking an intelligible word or phrase and burying it in a barrage of syllables to cloak its true meaning — all to make sure no one will ever be offended by words. Here are a few examples: Waterboys at football games are now known as “hydration specialists”. When a crime is committed, a suspect nowadays is called “a person of interest”. A broken home is all the more whole if we call it a “dysfunctional family”. And if someone is obese, they’ll be much more content with the title, “metabolic overachiever”. The insane have become “the reality challenged”, and a slum is an “economically deprived neighborhood”. And the list goes on…

Everyone is familiar with food stamps which have existed since 1939, but the brain trust in the federal government had a better idea. Now, that much-needed relief has been renamed the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program”. Are we better off with all that gibberish?

I have a male friend who isn’t very tall at just five feet, four inches, but he’s so much more fulfilled when we call him “vertically challenged”. Many companies formerly had departments called “Personnel”, but they’ve all been replaced with the new moniker, “Human Resources”. As George Carlin used to say, “That sounds like a place where one would go to procure organs for transplantation”.

Our language is now awash in blather and bone-headed twaddle that makes an ape look like a respected scholar. Hemingway and Mailer were esteemed, plain-spoken writers who used spartan phraseology to make their ideas clear. I’ll bet they’re spinning in their graves because of all the claptrap and baloney that’s run roughshod over our language. The day is young, so just wait for the oncoming mumbo-jumbo that will darken our doors. It’s beyond ridiculous.

Craig Malmrose,

North Carolina

Formerly of Bemus Point