You have to keep a close eye on all the euphemisms that are flying around these days.
A euphemism, for the benefit of younger readers, is a figure of speech that allows its user to call a spade a shovel, or even a trowel, rather than a spade. It allows you, in the words of the dictionary, to give a more pleasant, public-friendly spin to something that might otherwise have been considered unpleasant, offensive or out of order in mixed company (and take ‘mixed” to mean what you will).
Euphemisms are particularly prevalent in a place like the country we live in — in fact you can often find euphemisms that have become euphemisms of the euphemisms they were originally intended to be. We are multi-cultural. Different languages react differently to what they consider to be their social stimuli. Interpretation is everything — but who can interpret the rainbow?
A man walks up to a woman (or a man — let’s be politically correct here) who is a complete stranger and says, ‘I love you.” Full stop. But the ‘I love you” is not really expected to be taken in the Shakespearean sense. The man is not offering romantic engagement and lying under a mulberry bush in the moonlight with a Woodbine glowing in his hand talking about how her hair reminds him of flax on a distaff.
He is proposing that they have sex, here and now. He expects her to follow him home, or to his car, or to that spot behind the bar near the toilets where it doesn’t matter what happens, because that’s how it works in his culture. And, indeed, hers.
Frequently the woman, who is also not expecting any kind of lasting romance, agrees. Two animals in the forest. What’s love got to do with it? ‘Love” is a euphemism learned out of books at school that puts a pretty spin on what’s really going on.
But as the author Jean Rhys said: ‘Let’s call it ‘love’.” Life is too short to search for reasons.
Euphemisms pop up constantly in trying to decipher what is going on in our ‘cow-ntry” (sic) thanks to the inconsistent quality of how things are reported in the media.
Take the City Press from a couple of weeks back. Just two reports on two separate pages had me up on my feet and running round the barnyard wondering what was going on, who I could shoot and who I should report to for active duty in the event of a national emergency.
The first was headlined ”Baby T’ loses panties, car”. The subtitle said: ‘Hijackers surprise DJ, boyfriend.”
You read on, fearing the worst hijack-rape-case scenario. Instead you find that Mpumalanga radio DJ ‘Baby T” had actually been ‘relaxing”, in her own words, in her car when the fateful incident had occurred — relaxing, wearing nothing but a bra, in which she then ran down the road to look for help while her naked ‘boyfriend” was taken for a friendly drive round the neighbourhood and later dropped off, unscathed and still unclothed.
Here are euphemisms galore for you. The question is, what are we being told? Especially since both the hijacked car and the naked boyfriend are slyly being associated with the identity of a senior provincial minister. A euphemism allows you to say all that without actually saying anything that you can be nailed with in a court of law.
I don’t know how far you can, or should, stretch this elastic business of how euphemisms are employed to cover the traces of what’s really going on, like a dog kicking over the dirt behind his doings.
But the same City Press edition carried a story that had me running baffled around the barnyard in similar fashion, but on a much more potentially nation-threatening scale.
Minister of Arts and Culture Pallo Jordan had apparently been invited at some stage to go and hang out with some of the Xhosa chiefs in the Eastern Cape and had responded, in true, pugnacious, Xhosa fashion by telling them that he did not want to go and break bread with a bunch of illegitimate rulers whose authority was in doubt.
Maybe he was jumping the gun. Maybe one is supposed to let sleeping dogs lie, especially sleeping dogs who have been set up by their British colonial masters and look mightily like puppets, waking or sleeping, from a certain angle, but who command a certain respect among the silent majority of the Xhosas, Fingos and Thembus of British Kaffraria. And who, furthermore, have the endorsement of the present dispensation that did all in its power to eliminate them many years ago.
Anyway, all this was brought into sharp focus by the fact that State President Thabo Mbeki took the trouble of going all the way down to where the Xhosa chiefs and kings live to apologise for any inference that what Minister Jordan had said, from his educated point of view, had anything to do with fact. ‘The minister was wrong,” the president is reported to have said. Tacitly he was saying that the chiefs’ rule did indeed evolve from divine right and they should chill. He would be right there with them anytime. He would keep ‘the minister” chilled in Pretoria and there’s an end to it.
Now we all know that Thabo and Pallo, both commoners, would have had no truck with anything to do with this ‘chiefs” thing a few years ago. Unless it was the kind of ‘chiefs” that the African National Congress adopted as a way of describing a non-hierarchical hierarchy back in the much-missed days of exile.
How times have changed. Of course Thabo does not believe a word of what he is saying when he chastises the minister in front of the brooding, bust-pocked chiefs who might just swing the forthcoming election the ANC’s way. But he is there to smooth ruffled feathers anyway — even if those feathers are a euphemism for what might be a lot hairier just below the surface.