Of Words That Ravage, Pillage, Spoil

By Otto Friedrich

When the Federal Government launched a program last fall to gas chickens--more than 7 million so far--in an effort to contain an influenza virus in Pennsylvania, it said it had "depopulated" the birds. "We use that terrible word depopulation to avoid saying slaughter," explained a federal information officer, David Goodman.

Actually, it is not a terrible word but a rather distinguished one, derived from the Latin depopulare and meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "to lay waste, ravage, pillage, spoil." Shakespeare used it in Coriolanus when he had the tribune Sicinius ask, "Where is this viper/ That would depopulate the city?" John Milton's History of England referred to military forces "depopulating all places in their way," and Shelley wrote in Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills of "thine isles depopulate."

As with many words, though, the original meaning has faded, and Webster's now defines depopulate only as "to reduce greatly the population of." Even that is probably too clear and specific. When Goodman uses the word not as something done to an area but as something done to the victims, then its only function is to be long and Latinate and abstract. That makes it suitable as a euphemism for a blunter word, like kill.

All governments deal in euphemisms, of course, since the purpose of a euphemism is to make anything unpleasant seem less unpleasant. And since killing is the most unpleasant of government functions, the result is linguistic legerdemain.

Killing reached its apotheosis in Nazi Germany, and so did the language used to avoid saying so. Prisoners sent to concentration camps in the east carried identity papers marked "Ruckkehr unerwunscht," meaning "return unwanted," meaning death. Whole carloads of such prisoners were assigned to "Sonderbehandlung," meaning "special treatment," also meaning death. The totality of persecutions and killings was called "die Endlooeung," meaning "the final solution," that too meaning death.

Though the Nazis have never been outdone in applying seemingly harmless labels to the most hideous practices, most governments sooner or later find euphemism an indispensable device. "Pacification" has become a popular term for war ("War is peace," as the Ministry of Truth says in Nineteen Eighty-Four), but the Romans meant much the same thing by the term Pax Romana. "Where they make a desert, they call it peace," protested an English nobleman quoted in Tacitus. Viet Nam brought us new words for the old realities: soldiers "wasted" the enemy, some "fragged" their own officers, bombers provided "close air support." Even the CIA contributed a verbal novelty: "termination with extreme prejudice."

By changing the language that describes their actions, governments implicitly deny those actions. They invoke a kind of magic to guard their own authority. Language has always been a partly magical process, and the power to give names to things has always seemed a magical power. The Book of Genesis reports that when God created the lesser animals, every beast of the field and every fowl of the air, he "brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them." In China too, Confucius taught that the root of good government lies in the principle ofcheng ming, or precise definition.

Ah, but what is precise definition? One nation's freedom fighter is another nation's terrorist. Ronald Reagan is by no means the first President to put bright words on dark realities; Jimmy Carter, for example, called his aborted helicopter raid on Iran "an incomplete success." But Reagan seems to bring an exceptional dedication to the process. The term MX does not mean very much (the letters stand for "missile experimental"), but everybody knew the weapon under that name until Reagan began calling it the "peace keeper." After the Grenada invasion, which Reagan himself had first called an "invasion," he bristled at reporters for "your frequent use of the word invasion. This was a rescue mission." For such a small place, in fact, Grenada proved a richly fertile territory for linguistic flowering. The laurels go to Admiral Wesley L. McDonald, who, in trying to avoid admitting that the Navy had not known exactly what was happening on the island just before the U.S. landing, took a deep breath and declared, "We were not micromanaging Grenada intelligencewise until about that time frame."

Occasionally, of course, the military gets so carried away in its passion to rename things that it cannot persuade anyone to use its most imaginative terms. Resisting any mention of retreat, it devised the word "exfiltration," but even its own spokesmen find that hard to say. A "combat emplacement evacuator" is a splendidly resonant euphemism for a shovel, but somehow it has never caught on. It was only public ridicule, however, that persuaded the Penta gon to abandon the term "sunshine units" as a measure of nuclear radiation.

Government does not involve only military affairs, to be sure. Every aspect of economic policy attracts similar expressions of right thinking. When Reagan was convinced that taxes had to be increased, after he had promised to cut them, he be gan referring not to taxes but to "revenue enhancements," a term apparently invented by Lawrence Kudlow, formerly of the Office of Management and Budget. The tendency seems to be spreading. A spokes man for Budget Director David Stockman won special recognition for declaring that the Administration was not considering a means test for Medicare but a "layering of bene fits according to your income." The poor, in fact, are regularly euphemized into invisibility by being given new names such as "disadvantaged." One of the oddities of euphemisms, though, is that they tend to reacquire the unpleasant connotations of the words they supplant, like a facelift that begins to sag, and so they have to be periodically replaced. The world's poor nations have changed over the years from underdeveloped nations to developing nations to emerging nations.

Does the spread of such phrases -- if they are indeed spreading -- mean that the Government is becoming increasingly deceptive, or that it has more to hide? That would be uncharitable, perhaps unfair. Consider it instead a perfectly understandable desire to think well of oneself and of one's work. Isn't everyone counseled to think positively, to look on the bright side, to observe the dough nut rather than the hole, to see that a half-empty glass is really half full? In a time of uncertainty, it is possible to give the Government the benefit of the doubt, just as any citizen customarily gives the same benefit to himself. After all, as the saying goes, nothing is certain except death and taxes. Or rather depopulation and reve nue enhancement.

-- By Otto Friedrich