Soft Words, Hard Necks

How the soft word breaks the hard neck

The typewriter in the corner of the office is a heavy, cast-iron beast, smelling of oil and heated metal, and it sits on a desk that has been scarred by decades of frantic, urgent typing. It is a Tuesday in November, the light is grey and thin, pressing against the windowpane like a wet hand, and the clerk is composing a memo about “personnel adjustments.” The words are clean. They are polite. They are arranged in perfect, justified paragraphs that look like little cities of order on the page. The clerk does not write “firing.” He does not write “eviction.” He writes “adjustment.” He writes “reduction.” He writes “transition.” The ink is black and dry, and the paper is white and crisp, and the sentence ends with a period that looks like a small, black eye staring back at the writer. This is not a lie. A lie would be to say the person is staying when they are leaving. This is something stranger. This is the creation of a new reality, one where the violence of the act is erased by the softness of the syntax.

There is a fence in the middle of the road that everyone walks around, and the reason no one remembers why it is there is precisely the reason it must stay. The fence was put there to stop people from falling into the quarry, or perhaps to stop the sheep from wandering onto the tracks, but the quarry is now filled in and the tracks are gone. The fence remains. The reformers come along with their maps and their logic, and they say, “This fence serves no purpose. It is an obstacle. It is irrational.” They do not see that the fence has become a ritual. It has become a moment of hesitation. It forces the walker to look at the ground, to check the path, to acknowledge that the world is not a smooth, frictionless plane. The euphemism is that fence. It is the obstacle that forces us to hesitate before we act. When we say “collateral damage,” we are not lying about the death. We are building a fence around the word “death” so that we can walk past it without stopping. We are protecting ourselves from the weight of the thing we are doing.

The progressive who destroys the institution that was protecting the weak, because it looked like it was protecting the strong, has made a real error. He assumes that because the language was used to oppress, it was designed to oppress. He does not see that the language was designed to protect the oppressor from his own conscience. The bureaucrat who writes “downsizing” is not trying to hide the truth from the workers. He is trying to hide the truth from himself. If he writes “I am destroying your livelihood,” he must feel the weight of it. He must feel the guilt. He must feel the humanity of the man he is firing. The euphemism is a shield. It is a piece of armor that allows the man to remain a man, rather than becoming a monster. It is a mercy, in a strange, terrible way. It allows the system to function without breaking the human heart of the functionary.

But the cost is not borne by the functionary. The cost is borne by the victim. The victim hears the word “adjustment” and knows what it means. The victim knows that the fence is there, and he knows that he is being pushed over it. The euphemism does not change the reality. It changes the perception of the reality. It makes the reality seem smaller, softer, more manageable. It makes the violence seem like a mistake, or a necessity, or a trend. It makes the violence seem like nothing at all. And when the violence seems like nothing, it becomes easier to do more of it. The first “adjustment” is a shock. The second is a routine. The tenth is a statistic. The hundredth is a policy. The language has colonized the thought, and now the thought controls the action. The action is no longer a choice. It is a consequence of the grammar.

The fairy tale is not an escape from reality. It is the clearest statement of reality’s actual strangeness. In the fairy tale, the wolf is a wolf. The axe is an axe. The blood is red. There are no euphemisms in the fairy tale. The hero does not “engage in a non-consensual interaction with a canine.” The hero kills the wolf. The violence is explicit, and because it is explicit, it is contained. It is bounded by the story. It does not spread. The modern world has no wolves. It has only “personnel adjustments.”