On trial, I never refer to my client as “the defendant.” He’s Joe Smith, or whatever his name happens to be, because I want the jury to see him as a human being. Whether this makes a real difference to the jury is unclear. It’s one of a thousand things that happen at trial, and there is no metric to figure out whether it helps. The best I can argue is it can’t hurt, and there’s no downside to doing so. So why not?
Pamela Paul argues that the trend to euphemism, to vilifying one word as stigmatizing and replacing it with more words, has a cost. She has a point. Or two.
Much ado has been made of euphemism inflation, the ceaseless efforts to reform the English language toward desired social or political ends. The well-worn euphemism treadmill has fueled many a George Carlin bit, caused George Orwell to toss and turn feverishly in his grave and led even the most deeply sensitive among us to a grumpy grandpa “What are we supposed to call it now?” moment.
But while it’s easy to make fun of the changes, it’s worth digging deeper to examine the underlying logic of what can feel like — but rarely is — arbitrary new terminology.
There are quite a few serious people who are absolutely certain that “people first” language is critically important for the purpose of reform. Take, for example, calling someone a felon or an ex-con. They argue with absolute certainty that these are bad words that should never be uttered.
But the very power of that label has made it practically taboo. In its place, even federal prosecutors have adopted phrases like “justice involved” or “justice impacted” to describe those convicted of crimes — as if we could reform the entire criminal justice system simply by using new words.
Having known a few felons who eventually became ex-cons, they were far more concerned with getting acquitted or getting out of prison than what they were called. But Paul hits on the key concern here, that “we could reform the entire criminal justice system simply by using new words.” Granted, it’s not that reformers are relying solely on new words, so characterizing it as “simply” may be oversimplifying their position, but the proponents of “people first” euphemisms fight as if it is a life-or-death battle for the souls of the oppressed.
But euphemisms can inadvertently rob words of their moral force. “Enslaved person” humanizes the victim, but it also softens the indignity of what is a fundamentally dehumanizing condition. When, for example, Ian Urbina writes about contemporary “sea slaves” in the South China Sea, the abject state of the world’s victims is delivered in a verbal gut punch in a way “enslaved people at sea” would not.
Calling someone a felon has an impact. Calling someone a slave has an impact. Does calling someone a “person with a felony” “justice-impacted person” carry the same punch? Is an enslaved person as horrific as a slave?
Many of these changes seem neutral on the face of it. The replacement of “homeless” with “unhoused” at first glance seems like a superfluous switcheroo. But key to the change is the implication that the government has failed to provide a home, not that someone has lost one. Similarly, “poor” neighborhoods become “under-resourced communities.” And truancy, which feels like an accusation of juvenile delinquency, instead becomes “absenteeism,” which humbly suggests a box left unticked on the attendance list, more the fault of the school than the student.
What this reflects is an effort at burden shifting, that nobody is bad or wrong or criminal or drunk, but a victim of circumstance whom the government has failed to save. Is this really what’s going on, and nobody bears any responsibility for their choices or actions? Sometimes yes, and other times no. But just as they were all swept up in the same phrase before, they’re all swept up in the same longer and vaguer phrase now, even though their circumstances were largely, if not entirely, of their own making.
But that’s not the only flaw with the compelled use of euphemistic language to blunt the impact of harsher language to reflect that there is blame to levy and not everybody is a victim.
This tendency still exists in political language (see “enhanced interrogation”). But today’s vague language is more often used as a means to ward off bad things so we don’t have to deal with harsh reality. Euphemistic language becomes a kind of wishcasting, and perhaps even a way of avoiding — or covering up a lack of — more substantive reform.
The substitution of euphemisms for words that smack you across the face, like “torture,” creates a sense of accomplishment, that activists have achieved something important and valuable by changing felon to justice-impacted person. They can then pat themselves on the back and go have a chai latte, safe in the knowledge that they have changed the world.
But my felon clients just want out of prison, no matter how anyone refers to them. The best thing you can call them is ex-con, because that “ex” is what they really care about. Euphemisms might make reformers feel all warm and fuzzy, but breathing free air is what defendants want more than anything else.