The one that horrified me today was the phrase “cost of living”. It’s right in front of our faces that it literally costs money to remain alive.

Yeah that one gets me all the time too. Liberals are all the time about “Human life don’t have a price” and then they not only slap pricetag on everything human needs to remain alive, but they even price, by the hour, week, month, the worker’s time, their life itself.

And then they freak out at the term “wage slavery”.

“Human Resources” need I say anything more

I sometimes think about euphemisms for things that operate to negate their true nature and make them palatable for populaces that need their consentanufactured.

“Defense” used to describe all military expenditures and structures, particularly for the United States, which has spent nearly all of its “defense” efforts on aggression and territorial domination thousands of miles from its borders. It is conspicuous in how diligently it is used by certain groups, particularly large corporate media orgs, think tanks, and bourgeois politicians. There is, at minimum, an unconscious recognition that (the “good guys’”) war must always be framed in the language of defense. For them to describe, for example, the wars on Iraq or Afghanistan as wars of aggresson, which they absolutely were even by liberal definitions, is almost unthinkable. No, the “bunker busters” used exclusively on foreign countries must be “defense”.

“Heritage” to describe a white supremacist pining for chattel slavery in the South. Goes hand in hand with, “the peculiar institution” and “states’ rights”.

The (very deep, usually unconscious nowadays) allusions to vast “natural” spaces that were actually occupied by indigenous people for millennia. Indigenous people that faced a genocide by the same institutions that designate the spaces as official wilderness for its own members. Spinning a deep fiction around the meaning and history of these spaces.

A lot of language is like this. Whitewashed to avoid the horror of what they really mean.

Probably not a very creative one, but “landlord” shocked the hell out of me when I first moved to the anglo-sphere. Not sure why it never really registered with me before, but when my then flatmate handed me my tenants-agreement and told me about our landlord something just clicked. Still remember looking at him, thinking “my land…what the fuck”. No idea how this isn’t more inflamatory to anglos.

Just look at the way western media uses the word “violence.” Broken windows? Violence. Peaceful protest outside the homes of unreachable un-elected judges? Violence. Homelessness? Lack of healthcare? Redlining? Oh well, that’s just the way things are.

I hadn’t thought about it that way before. Yikes.

“Illegals, illegal immigrant, border hopper, etc.” About as dehumanizing and awful as you can get regarding living breathing human beings who are trying to escape hellholes that the intelligence services and armies that your country created.

“Labour Market”, people can be bought and sold like cattle then disposed of when their use is up. Completely disregarding the devastating effects this has on human life.

“Less then lethal weapons” regarding chemical weapons that are banned in international warfare, acoustic weapons that can permanently deafen or kill, tasers that will still kill a person, blinding pepper spray, and batons that can beat a person to within an inch of their life.

“Medical debt” or “alien” when referring to humans

“Humane” is the one I always come back to. It’s usually used as an adjective when doing horrible things.