Words that do the work: euphemism and engineered language

Series: How minds are moved · Foundations: how persuasion works · 7 of 7

In the week from 7 November, my news engine LSN News counted 661 English-language articles whose headline or opening line used the word “restructuring”. 198 of them were about jobs or staff. Only 45 of those used a plain word such as “layoffs”, “laid off” or “fired”. In 1946 George Orwell described this kind of language exactly. Political words, he wrote, are “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. Euphemism is the quietest form of persuasion. It does not argue. It just changes what you see.

Contents · 9 sections

TL;DR #

• A euphemism replaces a hard word with a soft one so that the listener does not form a picture of what is happening.
• Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946) is still the best guide: vague words are used when the real aim cannot be said openly.
• Every side does it: armies (“collateral damage”), intelligence agencies (“enhanced interrogation”), states at war (“special military operation”), companies (“rightsizing”, “year of efficiency”), shops (“pre-owned”) and activists naming their own causes.
• Engineered language works because we think with words. If there is no picture, there is less resistance.
• The defence is translation: say it back in plain words and see how it sounds.

What Orwell saw #

“Politics and the English Language” appeared in April 1946, between the end of a world war and the start of the Cold War. Orwell’s central example is worth reading in full:

“Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.”

And his diagnosis: “Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.” The great enemy of clear language, he added, is insincerity: “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

Orwell’s examples came from every direction of his time: British rule in India, Soviet purges, the atomic bombs on Japan. He did not think any side was free of it.

Words that do the work #

War #

• “Collateral damage” means civilians killed or property destroyed by an attack aimed at something else. It became common in US military language from the Vietnam era and was used widely in the 1991 Gulf War and the 1999 Kosovo campaign. In the week from 7 November the phrase appeared in 112 English-language articles on LSN News, mostly far from war, which shows how normal it has become.
• “Kinetic military action” was how the deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes described the US part in the bombing of Libya in March 2011, adding that “we are not getting into an open-ended war”.
• “Special military operation” is the Russian government’s term for the invasion of Ukraine since February 2022. The March 2022 law that punished “fakes” about the army made it legally risky to call it a war or an invasion inside Russia. Here the euphemism was not only suggested; it was enforced.
• In August 1968 the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia was described by Moscow as “fraternal assistance”, requested, Moscow claimed, by party and state leaders in Czechoslovakia. Romania, under Ceaușescu, refused to take part and condemned it.

Interrogation #

“Enhanced interrogation techniques” was the CIA’s term for methods used on detainees after 2001, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and stress positions. The US Senate Intelligence Committee’s study, whose 525-page summary was released in December 2014, concluded that the CIA’s use of the techniques “was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees”, and that they were more brutal than the CIA had told policymakers. Former CIA officials and several senators disputed those findings. The phrase itself has a history. In 2007 the writer Andrew Sullivan pointed out that Gestapo-era interrogators used verschärfte Vernehmung, “sharpened” or “enhanced interrogation”, which translates almost word for word; he said he was comparing the words and methods, not the regimes.

Work #

Companies rarely say “we are firing people”. They have a whole vocabulary for it, and my AI agent and I collected much of it in our earlier studies of the 2023 to 2026 tech layoffs:

• “Rightsizing” and “downsizing”, from the 1980s and 1990s.
• “Year of efficiency”: Meta’s description of 2023, announced with its results in February 2023 after about 11,000 job cuts; its shares jumped more than 20% after hours.
• “Reducing layers” and “removing bureaucracy”: the framing Amazon used for about 16,000 cuts confirmed in January 2026.
• “Exiting” people: Accenture’s word in September 2025 for staff it said it could not retrain for AI, inside a restructuring that cost about 865 million dollars.
• “Impacted employees”, “role eliminations”, “workforce reduction”, “realignment”, “streamlining”.

In Romanian the standard word is disponibilizare, literally “making available”, as if the worker had been freed up for something better. An earlier post of mine on “AI-washing” covered a newer trick, where cuts made for other reasons are explained as the future arriving. The vocabulary changes; the purpose is the same: describe a decision as a process, with no one deciding.

Shopping and daily life #

“Pre-owned” for used cars and watches. “Revenue enhancement” for a tax rise. “Negative growth” for a shrinking economy. These are small, but they train the ear to accept the soft word first.

Naming your own side #

Activists and campaigners do it as well, on every side, by choosing names that win the argument before it starts. In the abortion debate, each side calls itself after something nobody opposes: “pro-life” and “pro-choice”. In US tax policy, opponents of the estate tax renamed it the “death tax”. In a 2002 memo the Republican strategist Frank Luntz advised that “climate change” sounded less frightening than “global warming”; in 2019 The Guardian changed its style guide in the other direction, to prefer “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown”. Both choices were deliberate, and both were made public.

How it works #

Psychologist Robert Lifton, studying Chinese thought-reform programmes in the 1950s, called one of his criteria “loading the language”: a group’s special vocabulary replaces thinking with ready-made phrases. In my book Religions, Cults and Power I follow how later researchers built on him; one of them summarised it as clichés that “substitute for analytic thought”. The same happens outside cults. A word like “efficiency” arrives already positive. To object to it, you first have to translate it back into “people losing their jobs”, and most listeners never do.

What it feels like from the inside #

Euphemism feels like politeness, or like professionalism. It feels adult. The plain word sounds crude, emotional, even rude, and the person who uses it sounds like a troublemaker. That is the trap: the soft word makes the clear speaker look unreasonable.

What it can and cannot do #

• It works best on people far from the event. To someone who has lost their job, or their village, “rightsizing” and “pacification” persuade nobody.
• Euphemisms wear out. Each one slowly takes on the meaning it was meant to hide, and a new one is needed. This is sometimes called the euphemism treadmill.
• Not every soft word is manipulation. Tact has a place, especially with grieving people or sick children. The question is whether the soft word is protecting a person or protecting a decision.

How to notice it #

1. Translate it. Say the sentence again in the plainest words you can find.
2. Ask who did what to whom. Euphemisms often remove the actor: “mistakes were made”.
3. Look for long abstract nouns where there should be verbs: “optimisation”, “realignment”, “measures”.
4. Notice whose word it is. Each side’s name for a thing tells you its position.
5. Watch for words you are not allowed to use. When a plain word becomes punishable, the euphemism is doing serious work.

Frequently asked questions #

What is a euphemism in politics? #

It is a mild or vague word used in place of a harsh one, so that an action sounds acceptable. Orwell’s examples were “pacification” for bombing villages and “transfer of population” for expulsion.

What did Orwell argue in “Politics and the English Language”? #

That vague, inflated language is used to defend the indefensible, because the honest description would be too brutal to accept, and that bad language and bad thinking feed each other.

Is corporate layoff language a euphemism? #

Often, yes. Terms like “rightsizing”, “streamlining”, “year of efficiency” and “reducing layers” describe job cuts without naming the people affected or the people deciding.

Do both sides of political debates use engineered language? #

Yes. Campaigners on every side choose names for their causes and their opponents’ causes to frame the debate before it starts.

The lesson #

Words are the cheapest form of persuasion, and the hardest to notice, because they arrive as the normal way of speaking. Orwell’s advice still works: when a phrase makes something terrible sound tidy, translate it back into plain words and see whether you still accept it. That closes the first family of this series, the foundations. The next parts of the series turn from how persuasion works to who does it, and with what tools.