The Private List of Words That Mean Something Considerably Worse

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The Private List of Words That Mean Something Considerably Worse

I keep a small, entirely private list these days of phrases that mean something considerably worse than what they say, and I've started adding to it with the dedication of a man cataloguing a rare species of moth. "Fresh energy" is on there. So is "right-sizing," a term I still find genuinely bewildering when applied to a person rather than a pair of trousers. My current favourite, gathered secondhand from a friend three weeks into a "Head of Knowledge Transfer" title that arrived with no staff, no budget, and a distinctly funereal air about it, is "space for new voices," which he reports people now say to him with a completely straight face, occasionally twice in the same meeting.

What interests me about this whole dialect isn't the individual phrases so much as the sheer collective effort going into never once saying the plain version. I've delivered a fair number of genuinely difficult announcements across three different uniforms in my working life, and I can tell you with some authority that the honest ones, however brutal, are the kindest, because a person can actually begin dealing with a fact the moment they're told it plainly. What this dialect does instead is stretch the telling out across months, syllable by syllable, so that by the time anyone's actually shown the door, they've had so much advance warning in code that nobody quite has to say the sentence at all. It's not cruelty exactly. It might be worse than cruelty. It's cowardice with a really excellent vocabulary.

I went looking, out of pure bloody-minded curiosity, for how far this had spread, and found an entire secondary industry has grown up around softening the language further still — consultants, apparently, whose actual job is helping companies find gentler ways to say the same six words, which strikes me as roughly equivalent to hiring someone specifically to make a ship's hull breach sound like routine maintenance. My tea-spitting moment arrived reading that this service now has its own market rate, invoiced, presumably, in the same careful, apologetic tone as the announcements it produces.

What I keep coming back to is how much cleverer the euphemism is than almost anything it's protecting anyone from. Nobody genuinely believes "fresh energy" is a real, measurable quantity. Everybody in that room understood exactly what was happening, including, I suspect rather painfully, the man it was happening to. The phrase isn't there to fool him. It's there so that everyone else in the room can leave without having said, out loud, the thing they all just watched happen.

I don't have a satisfying way to close this out, because the man in question is still there, at a desk with no reports and a title that means nothing, and as far as I know nobody has told him anything further at all. The euphemism did its one job perfectly. It got everybody through the meeting without discomfort, which is, I've started to think, precisely what it was designed to do, and precisely the problem.

I keep waiting for someone in one of these meetings to simply say the plain sentence out loud, if only by accident, the way a genuine slip of the tongue occasionally tells you more than an hour of careful drafting. It hasn't happened yet. I suspect, by now, that the vocabulary has become so practised that nobody in the room could locate the plain version even if they went looking for it on purpose.

The full account of that call, and the rest of this year's dialect of managed disappearance, is live now at The Old Grey Thinker on Substack: https://theoldgreythinker.substack.com/p/start-here

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