Essay: Of Words That Ravage, Pillage, Spoil

When the Federal Government launched a program last fall to gas chickens—more than 7 million so far—in an effort to contain an influenza virus in Pennsylvania, it said it had "depopulated" the birds. "We use that terrible word depopulation to avoid saying slaughter," explained a federal information officer, David Goodman.

Actually, it is not a terrible word but a rather distinguished one, derived from the Latin depopulare and meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "to lay waste, ravage, pillage, spoil." Shakespeare used it in Coriolanus when he had the tribune Sicinius ask, "Where is this viper/ That would depopulate the city?" John Milton's History of England referred to military forces "depopulating all places in their way," and Shelley wrote in Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills of "thine isles depopulate."

As with many words, though, the original meaning has faded, and Webster's now defines depopulate only as "to reduce greatly the population of." Even that is probably too clear and specific. When Goodman uses the word not as something done to an area but as something done to the victims, then its only function is to be long and Latinate and abstract. That makes it suitable as a euphemism for a blunter word, like kill.

All governments deal in euphemisms, of course, since the purpose of a euphemism is to make anything unpleasant seem less unpleasant. And since killing is the most unpleasant of government functions, the result is linguistic legerdemain.

Killing reached its apotheosis in Nazi Germany, and so did the language used to avoid saying so. Prisoners sent to concentration camps in the east carried identity papers marked "Ruckkehr unerwunscht," meaning "return unwanted," meaning death. Whole carloads of such prisoners were assigned to "Sonderbehandlung," meaning "special treatment," also meaning death. The totality of persecutions and killings was called "die Endloöung," meaning "the final solution," that too meaning death.

Though the Nazis have never been outdone in applying seemingly harmless labels to the most hideous practices, most governments sooner or later find euphemism an indispensable device. "Pacification" has become a popular term for war ("War is peace," as the Ministry of Truth says in Nineteen Eighty-Four), but the Romans meant much the same thing by the term Pax Romana. "Where they make a desert, they call it peace," protested an English nobleman quoted in Tacitus. Viet Nam brought us new words for the old realities: soldiers "wasted" the enemy, some "fragged" their own officers, bombers provided "close air support." Even the CIA contributed a verbal novelty: "termination with extreme prejudice."