George Carlin's "Soft Language" (2019)

I guess the new words come with an agenda, they're not just words. It's a subtle method of manipulation.

It affects your perception, optimizing production costs is easier to do and less morally problematic than firing people.

I didn't read all of the article but I've watched that bit multiple times, IIRC his point was all of these euphemisms sanitize the language and hide the meaning and emotions behind words. PTSD is a clinical word with less emotional connotations, it sounds more manageable and it's easier to forget.

Maybe if we didn't change what it was, it would've been a bit more difficult to send people to wars where they can get 'shellshocked' instead of 'experiencing PTSD'.

>"Americans have trouble facing the truth," Carlin said. "So they invent a kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it"

It is useful and not limited to Americans, that's why people do it. Much more people would have been vegans or they would be much more indifferent to violence if every pack of meat had a QR code to a video showing the life and processing of that particular animal.

It's also not just softening that's practiced but hardening too. We dehumanise people all the time if we want to suppress them or kill them institutionally.

We humans like to live in an idealised reality, a fiction where we are just and don't practice cruelty, our parent's don't have sex, people have roles(social roles, gender roles, political roles etc) and they always act in a way to honour that.

The reality is much more different of course, we kill animals at scale we call terrorist or another dirty word those who we have institutional violent conflicts with and exterminate them, our parents have sex just like anyone else, mothers/fathers/leaders/police/ceo's are human too and they have human desires and human faults.

Then there's cultural movements trying to bring these things closer to reality or push them into a new virtual reality. The sex revolution in the west that the eastern world never had for example creates huge divide between lifestyle and family structures between westerners and easterners(it's not that easterner are backward, it's simply another path they took). The more devout muslims practice ceremonial animal sacrifice which often happens on the streets with kids around, so they tend to have different relationship with the animal killing(no, they are cruelty or anything like that, it's just different).

IMHO, it's nothing special to Americans but Americans tend to have control over the pop culture because the USA is the dominant culture of the last century. Also, Americans are masters of marketing and they choose their words very intentionally(like the discussion over abortions are framed like "pro choice" and "pro life", which can be very confusing for non-americans).

Softening them, like “crippled” to “disabled,” makes it seem like the manipulation or agenda is to make affected people feel more included by making them feel less bad. Maybe that’s an agenda, but my sense is the complainants are of the “kids these days” variety.