You can’t avoid the truth by avoiding plain speaking

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

George Carlin, the American comedian, died recently. He was famous for his no-nonsense, sometimes crude attacks on all kinds of hypocrisy in society. One of his strongest dislikes was the use of euphemisms to avoid speaking the truth about aspects of life people don’t like to think about. Life, he proclaimed, is sometimes nasty and brutal. Sometimes it sucks. Pretending it doesn’t won’t help you avoid the bad times or find a way out of the difficulties.

Whether it was the indignities of aging, the rich manipulating the poor, the hilarious oddities of sex, or that ultimate taboo, death, Carlin pushed his audiences’ noses into the creative muck that life is made of — and most of them loved it.

Here he is, speaking on what became a favorite topic (hat tip to Scott Berkun):

“You can’t be afraid of words that speak the truth. I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent a kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it. And it gets worse with every generation. For some reason it just keeps getting worse…”

He hated ’soft language’ because he believed it “takes the life out of life.” You can hear him on this topic right here, rasing laughs against “smug people who have created a language to conceal their sins.”

“Poor people” used to live in “slums.” Now the “economically disadvantaged” occupy “substandard housing in the inner cities”. And they’re broke! They’re broke! They don’t have a “negative cash flow position,” they’re [expletive] broke! … Smug, greedy, well-fed white people have invented a language to conceal their sins. It’s as simple as that.

If any group has been especially guilty of using language to conceal dubious actions it has to be business: all that impenetrable management and economic jargon is designed to obscure what’s happening, not reveal it. We need people like George Carlin to keep reminding us that avoiding the truth is the first action of every kind of rogue. See it happening and you can be certain someone in that area is up to no good.

Just wait for the next presidential campaign to start in earnest, if you don’t believe me.

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