Euphemisms: The Use Of The Names "Karen" or "Becky" To Describe Racist Women

I'm going to start by pointing out a personal irony... two of my favorite aunts, and human beings in the world, are named Karen and Rebecca... or, as I address them 'auntie Karen and auntie Rebecca;' one served in the medical research field until her retirement, then she earned a second degree in Nursing during her retirement! And the other served a career in the airline industry... both resilient and intelligent, both grew beautiful families (my cousins), and both are as beautiful as human beings can be, physically and spiritually.

Perhaps I am biased, but, really, that is not the reason I am sharing my thoughts here. As a PM and a paid professional business and IT problem solver, I have always known that there are things that simply should not be called anything but what they are, in the simplest terms possible, so that there will be no ambiguity... there is no need to coat the rusted body parts of your car with a shiny layer of paint (sugar coating), for if you want to really solve a problem, you must acknowledge it for what it is, and address the matter at the root-cause level, permanently.

I know, with the weak mind that most of us have at one time or another (perhaps including myself) we like to K.I.S.S. ... keep it stupid simple. In this case, it is not fair, and that lack of fairness bothers me to no end. As I stated in an online post I contributed to yesterday: "I really think that we should stop calling these punks "Karen" or "Becky," for that dishonors beautiful names that were given to many beautiful people. By the way, there is also an ethnic group called the Karen people, too. I think that we need to just call them what they are: [insecure divisive ignorant racist] social scum," and I attached an image of the spray-can above.

Triage...

"Bedside manners are no substitute for the right diagnosis."—Alfred P. Sloan

What happens when triage is not done right? What happens when problems are not dealt with in a timely, efficient, and effective matter? They fester and infiltrate... they hemorrhage and get out of control and become very costly to address, or, cause fatal outcomes, whether to business, society, or individual lives.

A recent example of relatively timely, efficient, and effective problem solving was a recent decisive decision taken by the German government; quoting an article from the Star Tribune:

"As Germany emerged from its coronavirus lock-down in May, police commandos pulled up outside a rural property owned by a sergeant major in the special forces, the country’s most highly trained and secretive unit. They brought a digger.

The sergeant major’s nickname was Little Sheep. He was suspected of being a neo-Nazi. Buried in the garden, police found 4? pounds of PETN plastic explosives, a detonator, a fuse, an AK-47, a silencer, two knives, a crossbow and thousands of rounds of ammunition — much of it believed to have been stolen from the German military.

They also found an SS songbook, 14 editions of a magazine for former members of the Waffen SS and a host of other Nazi memorabilia.

Germany has a problem. For years, politicians and security chiefs rejected the notion of any far-right infiltration of the security services, speaking only of “individual cases.” The idea of networks was dismissed. The superiors of those exposed as extremists were protected. Guns and ammunition disappeared from military stockpiles.

The government is now waking up. Cases of far-right extremists in the military and police, some hoarding weapons and explosives, have multiplied alarmingly. The nation’s top intelligence officials and senior military commanders are moving to confront a problem that has become too dangerous to ignore.

The problem has deepened with the emergence of the Alternative for Germany Party, or AfD, which legitimized a far-right ideology that used the arrival of more than 1 million migrants in 2015 — and more recently the coronavirus pandemic — to engender a sense of crisis.

Most concerning to authorities is that the extremists appear to be concentrated in the military unit that is supposed to be the most elite and dedicated to the German state, the special forces, known by their German acronym, the KSK.

This week, Germany’s defense minister, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, took the drastic step of disbanding a fighting company in the KSK considered infested with extremists. Little Sheep, whom investigators have identified only as Philipp Sch., was a member.

Germany’s military counterintelligence agency is now investigating more than 600 soldiers for far-right extremism, out of 184,000 in the military. Some 20 of them are in the KSK, a proportion that is five times higher than in other units.

But German authorities are concerned that the problem may be far larger and that other security institutions have been infiltrated as well. Over the past 13 months, far-right terrorists have assassinated a politician, attacked a synagogue and shot dead nine immigrants and German descendants of immigrants.

Thomas Haldenwang, president of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, has identified far-right extremism and terrorism as the “biggest danger to German democracy today.”"

Well, the [admirable] step Germany’s defense minister, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, took was needed... it was relatively drastic, but it is obvious that they waited too long to address this infiltration and infection, and now the whole of the elite Special Forces [KSK] became a clear and present danger to the immediate health and well being of the nation which they were sworn and trained to protect... it is like a case of an Autoimmune Disease that must be remedied.

Before such, these individuals and associations were considered, and labeled, as "fringe groups," "crazies," "ignorant people," "wanna-be's," "not human," "animals," etc. ... they were labeled anything and everything under the sun but what they actually were: ignorant human radical extremists and terrorists who are disconnected from balanced reality.

As adjectives, the difference between radical and extremist is that radical is favoring fundamental change, or change at the root cause of a matter, while extremist is holding extreme views, especially on a political subject. Now, combine both meanings to understand a radical extremest.

Using euphemisms can have very dangerous outcomes

Euphemism: a word or words that aim to disguise unappetizing truths or activities that fall under social taboo.

Another demonstrated example of the problem with using euphemisms is whether to apply the name of “torture” or “enhanced interrogation” to waterboarding, prolonged sleep deprivation, stress positions, extremes of hot and cold, and the entire bag of dehumanizing tricks devised by interrogators has far deeper importance than a mere choice of which terms will pass the test of legality or avoid public revulsion. 

The first label, "torture," is cruel and honest. The second is a euphemism: a word or words that aim to disguise unappetizing truths or activities that fall under social taboo.

Take describing overcrowded prisons rife with cruelty and corruption among both guards and inmates as “correctional” institutions! Or, the grade-A, 100% bull cookies, of using the phrase: “collateral damage” as the description of innocent civilians murdered in the course of aerial bombing! The epitome of brainwashing and psychological manipulation.

"Euphemism is no longer a disguise for truth but an absolute enemy to it."—Bernard Weisberger

Euphemisms change over time. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker termed this linguist evolution the “euphemism treadmill” and, over twenty years ago, argued that replacing old terms with new ones was likely inspired by the false theory that language influences thoughts, a notion that has been long discredited by cognitive scientists. Pinker described how those who board the euphemism treadmill can never step off: "People invent new “polite” words to refer to emotionally laden or distasteful things, but the euphemism becomes tainted by association and the new one that must be found acquires its own negative connotations."

"Orwellianism"... “Politics and the English Language”...

I now have a newfound understanding for George Orwell’s 1946 Essay: “Politics and the English Language” when he writes:

"In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech.

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine.

The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this: ‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last 10 or 15 years, as a result of dictatorship."

We need to heed these observations... we need to call this out, and not become users of it. My father used to say that admitting the truth (about mistakes) can be painful, but like the Bible says: the truth shall set you free. "If you do not admit a mistake, you will never learn from it, and you will continue to repeat it" he used to say.

Stop using ["polite"] euphemisms, call things what they are!

The other George...

Speaking of Georges... In one of George Carlin skits, he actually addresses the matter of euphemisms, and the propensity of us Americans for “soft language” that keeps reality at a comfortable distance.

A quote from the skit: “There’s a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It’s when a fighting person’s nervous system has been stressed to its absolute peak and maximum, can’t take any more input. The nervous system has either snapped or is about to snap. In the first world war, that condition was called "shellshock." Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables: "shellshock." Almost sounds like the guns themselves. That was seventy years ago...

... Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along, and the very same combat condition was called "battle fatigue." Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn’t seem to hurt as much. "Fatigue" is a nicer word than shock. "Shellshock!" Battle fatigue...

… Korea, 1950. Madison Avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called "operational exhaustion." Hey, we’re up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It’s totally sterile now. "Operational exhaustion." Sounds like something that might happen to your car…

... the war in Vietnam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it’s no surprise that the very same condition was called "post-traumatic stress disorder." Still eight syllables, but we’ve added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. "Post-traumatic stress disorder." I’ll bet you if we’d have still been calling it "shellshock," some of those Vietnam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. I’ll betcha that. I’ll betcha that.”

"Running as smoothly as a pig on stilts."

To quote a Potterism, as a nation, we are "running as smoothly as a pig on stilts." To keep addressing this as we have been for decades is not going to solve the problem, for we must remember that:

[1] "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them"—Albert Einstein.

[2] "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results"—Narcotics Anonymous.

The solution is not new or unknown; the wisdom has been figured out millennia ago... we just need to be honest with ourselves, acknowledge the problems for what they are, and start taking the needed unbiased steps to address them as permanently as possible. I say "as permanently as possible" because, as a process engineer, I recognize that acting on what I said above is just like any process, there is always space for improvement down the road, as we learn to do things better via acquiring new unbiased knowledge (facts).

Speaking of dehumanizing...

"All moral disengagement techniques are tricks to get people to accept behaviors that they would otherwise immediately recognize as unethical and unfair."

Before I wrap up my thoughts herein, there is a matter that we can not, and must not, ignore, and that is of one human being dehumanizing another.

As Dr. Sherry Hamby states in the article she had published in Psychology Today:

Dehumanization is one of eight forms of “moral disengagement” described by the psychologist Albert Bandura. Humans are capable of terrible crimes, and civilization has developed ways to inhibit aggression. However, we have not eliminated violence, in part because of techniques for creating (false) excuses and justifications for immoral behavior. All moral disengagement techniques are tricks to get people to accept behaviors that they would otherwise immediately recognize as unethical and unfair. For example, assuming most people are not big fans of child abuse, dehumanization and other moral disengagement strategies are used to trick people into accepting abuse of some children. The manipulators do it to secure power or financial gain.

Dehumanization involves redefining the targets of prejudice and violence by making them seem less human (that is, less civilized or less sentient) than other people. The classic strategy for this is to use terms like “animals” and “vermin.” Referring to people as “illegals” is also dehumanizing. You’ll see dehumanization at work in most large-scale atrocities or genocides committed by governments, armies, or terrorists. The main purpose is to get people to accept or even engage in behaviors that they know are wrong.   

Dehumanization is not limited to political issues, however. Any time someone reduces a human being to a single characteristic, especially a negative one, they are dehumanizing. “Alcoholic,” “addict,” “diabetic,” and “schizophrenic” all rob people of the full complexity of their lives and reduce them to a symptom or disorder. Even many self-professed humanitarians used dehumanizing (and inaccurate) terms like “superpredator” in the crime scare of the 1990s. All slurs (insults based on race, gender, sexual orientation, health status or other characteristic) are also dehumanizing.

You can’t fight dehumanization with dehumanization. —Dr. Sherry Hamby

Last but not least, "The Golden Rule"...

The idea dates at least to the early Confucian times, the times of the Chinese philosopher "Kǒng Fūzǐ" (孔夫子, meaning "Master Kǒng"), 551–479 BC, according to Rushworth Kidder, who identifies that this concept appears prominently in Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, and "the rest of the world's major religions."

143 leaders of the world's major faiths endorsed the Golden Rule as part of the 1993 "Declaration Toward a Global Ethic". According to Greg M. Epstein, it is "a concept that essentially no religion misses entirely", but belief in God is not necessary to endorse it. Simon Blackburn also states that the Golden Rule can be "found in some form in almost every ethical tradition".

Possibly the earliest affirmation of the maxim of reciprocity, reflecting the ancient Egyptian goddess Ma'at, appears in the story of The Eloquent Peasant, which dates to the Middle Kingdom (c. 2040–1650 BC)... four thousand years ago: "Now this is the command: Do to the doer to make him do." This proverb embodies the do ut des principle.

A Late Period (c. 664–323 BC) papyrus contains an early negative affirmation of the Golden Rule: "That which you hate to be done to you, do not do to another."

So, I ask you, my fellow human being: How hypocritical are most of us—especially those of us who subscribe to a major organized religion? I will leave you with that thought and root-cause problem, which—if I may remind you—seeds are planted at home, by our parents, or care-givers, from day one of our lives on Earth, and become a subconscious norm by the time we reach adulthood.

Quoting Dr. Ruth Benedict, "the life-history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities." Let's break this cycle of willful ignorance, now, and by personal choice.

Remember that...

[1] “Hatred is like a poison which you inject into your veins, before injecting it into your enemy. It is throwing cow dung at another: you dirty your hands first, before you dirty others.”—Visuddhimagga.

[2] “Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”—Alcoholics Anonymous

Advertising and B.S. ...

Our dumb Americans...

"43 Why do you not understand what I am saying? It is because you are unable to accept My message. 44 You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out his desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, refusing to uphold the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, because he is a liar and the father of lies. 45 But because I speak the truth, you do not believe Me!"—The Bible, John 8.

A must study website: THE MARSHALL PROJECT.