Do you ever find yourself agreeing or respecting a talking head that talks in "Plain English," uses "common sense" and "calls a spade a spade?"
I sure do - then my internal BS detector goes off and I realise they're politicians and they speak exclusively in spin and doublespeak. But I digress.
A lot of us are familiar with the term "fake news." It's a highly abstract term for news reporting, which is meant to be objective, instead is misrepresented by being opinion or outright falsehood.
"Fake news" isn't new. Because lying through one's teeth isn't new.
Fake news, like the words bathroom, PTSD, and sanitation engineer all hopped on a phenomenon called the euphemism treadmill.
This process, as described by scholar and linguist Steven Pinker, is a societal shift from the use of certain words towards more palatable alternatives.
Think of the word "toilet." In most situations toilets - and the actions performed there - is something that high society would rather not mention in good company. So we adapted the word bathroom. This still contained some vestige of bodily contact with porcelain (bath) and we ran the treadmill again and landed upon restroom. A few more miles on the rubber excised the room entirely: lavatory. An ancient case of "if you know, if you know."
The same happened to soldiers in World War I that suffered from "shell shock", which then became "battle fatigue" by World War II, and the present day "combat-induced Post Traumatic Stress Response."
Printing lies was once called yellow journalism, which is now called fake news. It connotes an air of lost respectability; that organisation still peddles news but it's either distorted, slanted, or outright made-up. The generation of today trying to make its mark on what came before. It's novel to us, but not to history.
Why do we do it? It's hard to tell. We as humans seem to want to forget about the unpleasant facts of life sometimes - why do we use the euphemism "passed on" instead of "died?" - and our cognitive shields go up as a result.
As much as we want to call fake news spades and spades toilets; we need to be reminded of the context in which we utter the word and those who will hear it.
As much as you'd like to tell grandma you need to "drop a deuce in the shitter" I think we'd all be better off if you excused yourself to "use the lavatory" instead.
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