Showing posts with label Rain Forest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rain Forest. Show all posts

Monday, October 15, 2007

Words of the Weasel Part 2

Sexworker
Shakespeare called them whores. By the 19th century whore had become vulgar and the word prostitute came into use. In the 21st century prostitute seems judgmental and pejorative and so sexworker was invented. The “worker” part sounds virtuous. I expect them to join AFL-CIO any day now. Even better it is gender neutral.
Rain Forest
A neutral sounding replacement for “jungle”, popular with conservation groups attempting to preserve jungles. It gives us “the law of the rain forest” in place of “the law of the jungle”, and “Rainforest Fighter” in place of “jungle fighter”.
Wet land
A conservationist’s word meaning “swamp” but sounding much nicer. It is easier to get people interested in preserving “wet lands” than “swamps”. When you are up to your ass in alligators you have to remember your objective was to drain the wetland.
Plan
Most often used as “They had no plan for such and such” where such and such is a disaster (e.g. Iraq, Hurricane Katrina). This charge is always false. Of course they had a plan, everyone has a plan. It may be that the writer doesn’t like the plan, or the plan didn’t work. Disasters happen for a lot of reasons, some obvious, some not so obvious. If the writer had some understanding of the disaster he might name some of the reasons for the occurrence. Writers that don’t have clue (say the average reporter) will complain of the lack of a plan. Such complaints are bogus. The writer is really trying to say that we should not have the disaster, which is true but hardly profound. A military cliché is “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy”.