Oh Lord, save
us from euphemism!
It seems
astonishing but it was actually more than 20 years ago that I wrote an article
for The Independent which was fairly savage about certain nasty but popular
expressions. One of them was ‘natural wastage’. When I first heard this I was
curious; I seriously had no idea to what it referred and I recall being a
little shocked to learn that it was intended as a quick way of referring to
people who take early retirement at a time when a company is intent on shaving
down numbers. So it’s kind of but not quite ‘a forced early retirement’.
Perhaps the
person or committee that came up with this term intended the ‘natural’ element
to convey something that is going along happily in the ordinary course of
things, and therefore is acceptable. But the idea of ‘wastage’ makes the expression
totally repugnant, particularly as regards putting people out of work. Somehow
the inventor of this expression either missed a trick or is taking the Michael.
Natural
wastage is one of many grubby little euphemisms. Like most euphemisms it sits
on the shady side of the street and is used as a means of, at best, lessening
the impact of a hard truth and, in most cases, attempting to sterilise the
emotional impact of words. But it’s an odd thing to do isn’t it? To use words which
seek to muffle meaning? So often, the very attempt at muffling meaning or
diverting an emotional reaction will simply draw attention and even augment the
very emotion you are seeking to calm or suppress. There is a cold, clinical
detachment in ‘natural wastage’ – a sense of job-lot disposal of real human
beings – that is not felt at all in the easy equivalent idea of ‘early retirement’, even of ‘forced early retirement’.
One other
point about this particular expression and then I’ll stop worrying the bone on
the floor any further. Part of the reason for its repugnance is that it is one
of a number of macho, semi-militaristic expressions that flooded business
language in the late eighties and early nineties. Business people, even
number-counters, liked to think of themselves as bold, aggressive fighters
bringing home the bacon, doing the deals, hoisting the stuff up the flagpole,
bringing each other up to speed. The first Gulf War brought such gems as ‘collateral
damage’ meaning the accidental killing of civilians into most people’s living
rooms and this and other military terms were a gift to the new business ‘speke’
of that era.
Another one
is ‘ethnic cleansing’ – a term that bobbed up at about this time, leaping on to
the news pages and into the mouths of broadcasters as they reported on the
Bosnian/Serbian conflict in former Yugoslavia at the beginning of the nineties.
I couldn’t believe
that people would stoop to use such a term. What on earth is ‘cleansing’ about
a process that starts at persecution and ends at cold bloodied murder? I remain
amazed that this strangely anodyne term is still used today to describe an
activity that so often happens in war-torn countries across the globe.
Here’s what I said at the end of that article of yesteryear: “Natural wastage is probably as welcome a term to the naturally wasted as ethnic cleansing is to the ethnically cleansed. Let us murder, kill, rid ourselves of, but let us not ethnically cleanse.”
But twenty
years later and this proved to be such a fruitless plea. There are some
fashions of speaking which just disappear after a brief outing – remember how
everyone in business referred to their salaries in terms of ‘k’? But a large
number remain. What slightly disturbs me is that so many of those that eventually
get bound into the lexicon show our weakest profile.
