Guest post: Bureaucracies love euphemism

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March 15, 2026

Originally a comment by Artymorty on An unusually crass opinion.

I’m of the mind that crass language and blunt, confrontational talk is a great tool for smashing bullshit. Too often, people use politeness and euphemism as a shield to hide behind, as deflection to avoid responsibility. When confronted with blunt reality it’s often a lot harder for people to avoid facing their complicity in bad things. I see it in office culture all the time, and I can’t stand it. Bureaucracies love euphemism and they hate bluntness. Especially bureaucracies that are propping up bad things.

In the 2000s, for example, it was euphemism and politeness that enabled unscrupulous financiers to repackage and sell junk mortgage debt: they danced around the blunt facts with pretty language, and by 2008 the ruse collapsed and nearly brought down the global economy with it. It was the pretty language that those bad mortgages were packaged in that gave everyone all up and down the financial chain of command permission to look the other way for so many years, even as many individuals within the system had surely, privately, caught on that it was a scam. More than a year before the subprime mortgage fiasco began to unravel, Harper’s magazine ran a cover story with blunt language, exposing the whole thing. But of course, finance bros don’t read Harper’s. If only more industry insiders were more plainspoken about the scam earlier on, if only they’d been more crass and called those financial instruments what they were — bullshit for suckers — all that financial destruction and the human suffering it caused might have been prevented.

I come from poor neighbourhoods, and I feel like an outsider in environments that fetishize politeness to the point of ignoring higher principles. If I worked in law, I’d be more like Erin Brockovich than, say, Barack Obama.

With respect to the transgender mess, the legal system could do with a whole lot more blunt talk, Erin Brockovich-style, to shake some sense into those cowardly, complicit phonies. This issue really comes down to men’s genitals and men’s sexual entitlement.

When I see people get outraged over crude language even when it’s being deliberately deployed to call attention to more fundamental, higher-order problems, I immediately suspect it’s because the crude language is hitting them in a sensitive spot, and it’s about to uncover a hypocrisy they don’t want to face. I’ve been the one calling bullshit bluntly to people who don’t want to hear it, more than once.

When judges panic about crude language around penises, maybe it’s because they can’t face the fact that they’ve been complicit in allowing those penises in places they absolutely shouldn’t be.

Comments

8 responses to “Guest post: Bureaucracies love euphemism”

Tim Harris

Mar 15, 2026 5:14 PM

Euphemisms — the one I can never forget is “enhanced interrogation”. They function to make something sound vaguely “official” and “technical”, and difficult to understand unless you are privy to all the intellectual and legal history & structures that supposedly underlie and inform them. And, therefore, somehow respectable. A word we now keep hearing out of the rosy lips of the Hegseth is “kinetic”, which, if translated, appears to mean “as violent and destructive as possible, and bugger the consequences”. “Kinetic strikes”(on elementary schools or “narco-terrorists” in small boats, for example), kinetic this, kinetic that. I had not heard this usage until this regime came into power, but perhaps it was regularly used in military circles earlier and has only recently has come to be used publicly.
Acolyte of Sagan

Mar 15, 2026 6:02 PM

Tim, are you sure that ‘kinetic’ is a euphemism? Because given how this administration (dys)functions it could easily be an abbreviation of ‘fucking hectic’.
Steven

Mar 15, 2026 7:22 PM

More than a year before the subprime mortgage fiasco began to unravel, Harper’s magazine ran a cover story with blunt language, exposing the whole thing.

After the Enron collapse I read an article (no idea where, sorry) about it. The article recounted that a finance course at a business school (Cornell?) had given students an assignment to pick a publicly traded company and run standard financial metrics on it (P/E, debt-to-equity, that kind of thing).

One group chose Enron, and ran the metrics, and reported that Enron was very highly leveraged, was pursuing a high-risk business strategy, and that there was significant possibility of fraud.

All the class reports were posted on the school’s web site, publicly available, and sat there for years…until Enron collapsed. Anyone could have looked.
Tim Harris

Mar 16, 2026 4:55 AM

Yes, Acolyte, it could certainly be an abbreviation of “fucking hectic”, but what interests me about the word (in the way it’s used by Hegseth & others) is its scientific aura, its suggestion that what is happening is both violent and an index of overwhelming, god-like power, but also that it is mindless (which of course it is in a sense other than the sense I am trying to establish) and mechanical and has nothing to do with human intentions, decisions or responsibility (“kinetic energy” is, according to the OED, “energy which a body possesses by virtue of being in motion”), and so cannot be understood at all in human terms. War has been refined, as it were, into a sort of natural happening that can be understood only through physical laws. What violently happens just happens – it is what used to be called in more religious eras “an Act of God”, as at Sodom and Gomorrah. No-one is responsible for what is happening, particularly not the Trump regime and the Netanyahu regime, so no-one should feel upset or guilty.

I am reminded of how the interesting fascist writer Ernst Jünger represented in his book “Der Friede. Ein Wort an die Jugend Europas. Ein Wort an die Jugend Der Welt” (“The Peace: A Word for the Youth of Europe; A Word for the Youth of the World”) the Nazis’ seizure of power, the Shoah, the destruction of World War 2 as fundamentally a cosmic calamity for which nobody was responsible. That is why I characterise the word “kinetic”as “euphemistic” since it seeks, as does the term “enhanced interrogation”, to conceal actions taken by human beings, and the responsibility for these actions, beneath a quasi-scientific veneer.

“The Peace”, by the way, was intended for Allied readers, not for the German people. Typescripts were circulated, and the authorised version was finally published in Amsterdam in 1943. An English translation was published in 1948 from the right-wing publisher Henry Regnery Company, Hinsdale, Illinois,
Guest post: A cosmic calamity for which nobody was responsible – Butterflies and Wheels

Mar 16, 2026 5:18 AM

[…] a comment by Tim Harris on Bureaucracies love […]
Bjarte Foshaug

Mar 16, 2026 6:37 AM

It’s not a euphemism, it’s “sensitivity”.

(↑ Does that count as a meta-euphemism?)
Sackbut

Mar 16, 2026 5:38 PM

Hegseth is almost certainly misusing the term, but there is a category of weapons called “kinetic” because they do damage based solely on the energy of impact, rather than explosions or chemicals or flames. Bullets and cannonballs, for example, are usually “kinetic weapons”. Odds are, Hegseth heard the term and totally misconstrued what it means.
Tim Harris

Mar 16, 2026 10:44 PM

Thank you, Bjarte & Sackbut. Coupled with the “euphemistic” or “sensitive” is the naming of wars as though they were video-games for adolescent bullies, or Marinetti-esque spectacles created expressly to provide aesthetic delight: “Desert Storm”, “Shock & Awe”, and now “Epic Fury”, each title seeking to outdo the last – how long can the crescendo go on for? Again (and despite the juvenile celebration of violence and American military might), the result is a trivialisation of war. Fox couples scenes of buildings and little girls being blown to smithereens with commentary on how splendidly the war is going, or it chats vacuously about “narco-terrorists” as scenes of fishing-boats being blown up on the open seas play out; the White House puts out cheery little videos consisting of scraps from violent films, pictures of Hollywood “heroes” and brutal internet memes, punctuated by lovely real explosions in black-and-white as “death” is “rained” upon Iran. A terrible triviality is born.