Dilution of Language is Not the Solution
22nd May 2025
Way back, and into the Twentieth Century, the saying was “Dilution is the solution for pollution.” And this was true to a point, because enough water thins out waste to the point that it is no longer harmful and that environmental factors can deal with it (sunlight, critters of varying sizes eat it, washed into ocean and thus neutralized.) It also applied to land, and spreading manure and other waste on the land, plowing it in, and waiting can solve many problems.
Alas, the quantity of polluting substances outgrew the ability of rivers/land to accept and deal with the effluent. This led to things like the Great Stink when the Thames River basically died, cholera and typhoid fever outbreaks, and so on. Over the late 1800s and on, people found ways to turn refuse into usable stuff (coal tar to dyes and medicines, anyone?), to process polluted water so that it was no longer harmful (The Imhoff Tank and other things), or replacements for the polluting technology (cars and buses instead of horses).
The rise of bureaucracy has led to something like this with language. Now, bureaucratic obfuscation goes back a loooooong way. Shang Dynasty and later Chinese sources tend to omit references to problems, in part because the thought was that not mentioning it would reduce the harm done by the problem. No one wants to tell the monarch the unpleasant truth, so it fell to people like Russia’s Holy Fools, or the court jester to bear the bad tidings. Now we have euphemisms and “approved terms” to avoid causing distress or to confuse the uninitiated. Instead of “mental retardation” we have “non-neurotypical,” or “on the spectrum,” neither of which describe the medical and social condition. “Previously-underserved communities” is another one that makes me twitch. Unwarranted use of the passive voice chaps my hide.* “Undocumented migrants,” gets tossed around in the media, rather than the legal term “illegal alien,” although “resident alien” is still OK for now. Humpty Dumpty’s [corrected. Thank you] definition of “A word means what I say it means, no more and no less” has become reality.