How quickly new words are telegraphed on the grapevine. Everyone adopts the latest slogan even as it changes daily.
Flatten the curve gives birth to lockdown which requires a firebreak or circuit breaker. Now there's a new, official monotone: "you've been put into tier (add number)".
This is euphemism. This is follow fashion, group think without thinking but it hides a motive. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo revealed as much in a telephone call revealed by Hamodia newspaper: there is no scientific basis for these ad hoc curfews.
"This is not a highly nuanced, sophisticated response. This is a fear-driven response. You know, this is not a policy being written by a scalpel. This is a policy being cut by a hatchet. It’s just very blunt... it’s out of fear. People see the numbers going up—‘Close everything! Close everything!’"
He's lying, of course, as the international coordination and rolling out of other agendas confirm. Hence the need for euphemism. If you call it by its name - martial law, curfew, house arrest or detention - the next clause must explain why.
Does the grey officialese of the latest euphemism mean that the unspoken agenda has become more serious? If you are put into tier two lockdown you, naturally, will take the language of levels very seriously - a little more freedom versus a lot less.
Who chose those words? They're not yours.
Despite numbers and levels, the tiers don't have the clear logic of a traffic light system. Rule of six (1) versus no gatherings in your garden (2) No social contact outside your household in any setting (3) have an arbitrary feel to them. It's almost certain that police will in practice apply a broad brush, sweeping aside the nuances of this tier versus that.At the end of the day people are being accustomed to tighter lockdowns with the intimation that it's just for a couple of weeks. It mirrors the beginning of Event Covid when flatten the curve for a fortnight turned into lockdown for months on end.
I wish I could find that Reuters TV clip in which the crew serendipitously filmed a man at his window urging the crowds below to go home to "flatten the curve". I suspect there was nothing spontaneous about the origin of this euphemism or the man at the window. Like the footage of people in every country clapping for health workers it seemed to begin on television before it began in real life. Or rather, they began the begin.
What moments divine, what rapture serene,
Till clouds came along to disperse the joys we had tasted,
And now when I hear people curse the chance that was wasted,
I know but too well what they mean;So don't let them begin the beguine
Let the love that was once a fire remain an ember;
Let it sleep like the dead desire I only remember
When they begin the beguine.-- Cole Porter, 1935
Please indulge my frivolity and take a moment to recall a great New Yorker:
Like interpretation in music, euphemism can be a way to give words new meaning, or to hide it.
As the comments of Governor Cuomo suggest, this is not about science but it may not be about fear, either. In order to justify curfew, bureaucrats changed the metric from deaths to cases, generated by a test which they know creates a huge number of false positives.
It's interesting to see that the word curfew seems to have been sanitized online. The synonyms offered are mostly rather mild: gesture, curfews, clampdown, instruction, close of day, injunction, candlelight, restriction, command, eve, lockout, candlelighting, commission, bedtime, embargo, limitation, kind, omen.
Our language is being manipulated. The dictionaries work in real time, nowadays.
We had an example this month when Merriam-Webster dictionary updated the entry for 'sexual preference' after Judge Amy Coney Barrett used the term in her Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
Merriam-Webster, the noted reference book and dictionary publisher, qualified the term as "offensive". That was after Democratic senator Mazie Hirono rewrote the language on the spot, condemning Coney Barrett's assertion that she "would never discriminate on the basis of sexual preference.”
"Sexual preference is an offensive and outdated term,” she chided the judge. “It is used by anti-LGBTQ activists to suggest that sexual orientation is a choice.”
I'd ask Hirono and her acolytes why they didn't just stick with the word, sex, as in:
"Do you take your coffee with sugar and what kind of sex do you like?"
Ah, now I see the need for the euphemism. We'd better find a euphemism for the euphemism.
As this example shows, euphemism is not simply a matter of words but the modus operandi of politicians and social engineers. During these times of pandemic... wait... the meaning of pandemic was also changed.
The Classical Definition of a Pandemic is Not Elusive, by Heath Kelly -- Bulletin of the WHO, 2011
During these times of pandemic the meaning of the word, science is also altered by fixing it with the definite article. Now we can argue that the flattening the curve, lockdown, firebreaks, circuit breakers and tiers are not about science, as Governor Cuomo admits, but may still be about 'the science'.
We hear about 'the science' when a group of people presume to impose rules by appeal to authority, which is one of the famous logical fallacies. It's often used in the phrase 'the science says such and such'. Science is a way to measure what we are observing, confirmed by testing and experiment and the formulation or updating of hypotheses. It is not and never has been a set of rules and it cannot bestow righteousness upon an idea or a group of people.
Righteousness... This can go on forever. A word which rarely was heard outside its religious setting, in sermons or songs or if you grew up with reggae.
Righteous is flung around nowadays. People bestow the word, as meaning politically correct, upon politicians and like-thinkers. What would probably have been taken as a backhanded insult when I grew up is now taken face-value as praise. Is it a sign, as Jonathan Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind, that reason is being used as a tool to secure social status? Or is it evidence that 'the science' has replaced religion: instead of being bestowed by God upon David, we become righteous through our adherence to 'the science'.
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