How Soft Words Sell Hard Lies

On Euphemism, Rebranding, and Language Laundering

Watch your thoughts, they become words;

Watch your words, they become actions;

Watch your actions, they become habits;

Watch your habits, they become character;

Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.

—Lao Tzu

Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.

—Kait Rokowski

Sticks and stones may well break bones, but words rewrite reality.

Before you call BS or claim hyperbole, consider Ernest Hemingway’s apocryphal, gut-punching line "For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn.”

Per Open Culture, the myth sets Hemingway in a hotel sometime in the 1920s. He was allegedly having lunch with a group of writer pals when he bet them he could write a story with a full narrative in just six words. After his friends put their money down, Hemingway jotted down a few words on a napkin and passed it around the table. Though brief, the other writers couldn't deny that "Baby Shoes" was indeed a full story.

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A sentence can shatter a stock price, spark a war, or save a life. No sword swings that wide; hence why the pen is much mightier.

As Morgan Housel always says: “Best story wins.”

What’s more: the sharpest blades don’t look dangerous. They arrive sanded smooth, euphemized, and gift-wrapped so gently we thank the attacker for the courtesy.

It’s a sort of linguistic laundering that, like carbon monoxide, sneaks up on ideas and momentum subtly and silently until it’s far too late.

In a recent piece, the inimitable Ted Gioia called this out (emphasis his):

I saw something very frightening in most of these AI defenses—namely the desire to justify terrible actions by manipulating the definition of words.

Is it really possible to dismiss all this danger and mayhem—for example, a bot encouraging a woman to slit her wrists, and giving precise instructions how to do it—with sly word games?

This shocked me. Surely you can’t erase evil actions by linguistics.

But after I thought about it, I wasn’t really surprised. This is actually quite common nowadays. Social harm and degradation get cleansed by definition. You see this everywhere.

I call this the gentlemen’s club solution. Guys who go to strip joints are seedy and disreputable. So you change the name.

The strip joint becomes a gentlemen’s club. Now the clientele are gentlemen—by definition. Problem solved!

Do you find this persuasive?

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Daniel Patrick Moynihan grasped the danger of this tactic more than thirty years ago. He saw that our leaders could make any problem go away without fixing it—they just had to adjust the terminology.

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History’s grand master of the rebrand might be Alfred Nobel himself. After inventing dynamite, he read a premature obituary calling him “the merchant of death.”

Horrified, he spent his fortune reframing his legacy—hence a Peace Prize that still glosses over (literally) explosive origins with velvet vocabulary. One well-chosen word—peace—outlived a lifetime of booming, blasting, and bombing.

Below are a few other everyday deodorizers. See past the label and don’t pinch your nose at the BS:

• “Negative patient outcome” = The patient died

• “Algorithmic curation” = A filter bubble that thinks for you

• “Youth access to gender-affirming care” = The genital mutilation of a vulnerable teen

• “Collateral damage” = Dead civilians

• “Abortion” = Killing a baby before it draws its first breath

• “Enhanced interrogation” = Torture, but notarized

• “Quantitative easing” = A Central Bank printing more money and devaluing the dollars in your savings account

• “Restorative justice” = No jail time, just paperwork

• “Kinetic military action” = War

• “Involuntary separation” = You're fired (Karen’s Version)

• “Revenue enhancement” = Higher taxes, scented with jargon

• “Synergy realization” = Budget cuts and pink slips

• “Content moderation” = Censorship from a climate-controlled office

Language is always the first battlefield.

When Orwell warned, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” he was describing this precise shell game.

Whoever names the thing, frames the thing, and—by playing with a lopsided, linguistic home field advantage—usually wins the thing.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes:

The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

The task before us is simple, brutal, and necessary: translate the perfume back into the stink.

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Words have the power to heal or harm, to build or destroy, to reveal truth or obscure it. In our hyperconnected age, when a single phrase can go viral and reshape public opinion overnight, this power grows exponentially.

Speak simply and plainly, especially when the stakes are highest.

In the poker game that is life, call a spade a spade—lest your diamond stay buried, your club turn against you, and your heart break on the river.

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Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on Twitter X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom