George Carlin had a bit about language. About how Americans keep inventing softer and softer words to avoid dealing with hard realities. He traced how “shell shock” became “battle fatigue,” then “operational exhaustion,” then “post-traumatic stress disorder.” Same condition. Each generation found a way to drain the humanity out of it, bury the pain under more syllables, more distance, more jargon.
He called it soft language. Language that takes the life out of life.
Carlin was doing this bit in 1990. He had no idea how good it was going to get…