Who is this Humpty Dumpty? Where is he? He gets about. We can’t avoid him. From Land’s End to John o’Groats he demonstrates that it’s easier to change the label on the jar rather than what’s inside it. It’s no surprise then that we live in an age of euphemism and verbal camouflage. It was Humpty Dumpty who said: “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” It left Alice confused. We too are confused. In Humpty Dumpty land words are like chameleons. They adapt to match the landscape.
We shun earthy four-letter words that everybody knows and nobody uses in polite society. (In restricted areas like board rooms and building sites things are different. And it happened that the King James Bible was brought into being in a less squeamish era than our own. As a result there are chapters that cannot be read in public without editorial amendment.) We now replace words like ‘blind’, ‘deaf’ and ‘lame’ by circumlocutions. That shows an appropriate awareness of other people’s misfortunes. At the same time, however, television scripts are littered with formerly taboo words. Drama shuffles in pursuit of verisimilitude.
Changes in vocabulary may just mean sugaring the pill or painting the lily. And a touch of vanity may come into it. Undertakers are now funeral directors. Professors proliferate and so do CEOs. Management has generated a vocabulary of its own with terms like out-sourcing and blue-sky thinking pointing to mysteries beyond the understanding of lesser mortals.
Inescapably, we live in a digital, an electronic, an egalitarian age. We also live in a hyper-sensitive age in which re-labelling may be adopted as a comforting, re-assuring process. Those who adjust our vocabulary and particularly those who coin words and phrases to identify new elements – or camouflage old ones – in our everyday life are determining our manner of speech. Marketing people and script-writers are shaping the way we think. In the streets as much as in the palaces of power we need to beware. Remember. Humpty Dumpty is cousin to Hurly Burly and often keeps company with Willy Nilly. You just can't believe a word he says. But he has ears. And he listens to what we say. Have a word with him.
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