Quality advice to avoid issues

Richard Jewell (1962-2007)

I dedicate this week’s column to the late Richard Jewel, a regular cop who earned months of public abuse for staying alert, doing his job and saving lives during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
Some would say he performed quality work when faced with a potential situation.
I would not.
While I am not above wasting ink on ideas of dubious value, I draw the line at wasting ink on words that convey nothing at all.
Alas, because of the way people use “quality” and “situation,” I end up using a lot of ink drawing that line.
In the case of “quality,” blame for the misuse — as for so much deterioration of American diction — likely rests with advertisers. A thorough search of the archives might even pinpoint what ad for which product started it.
I imagine a Lucky Strike-puffing copywriter on Madison Avenue deleting one little word on his way to a four-hour martini lunch on Tuesday, so the handbills printed Wednesday proclaimed “For a quality washday soap, buy Sudzo!” instead of “For a high quality washday soap, buy Dynokleen!” (Did I miss my calling, or what?)
Was that writer just trying to save a tiny bit of ad space, or was he consciously and sneakily avoiding any commitment as to whether the “quality” in question was high or low, letting the targeted consumers fill in that crucial bit based solely on the number and size of the following exclamation points, or on the beatific look of satisfaction worn by a June Cleaver doppelganger?
Likewise “situation,” although in this case I blame the military-trained butchers of English. We are well served if they can render our enemies half as impotent as they make their prose.
A high-ranking spokeshuman probably intended to avoid alarming the citizenry by leaving out words like “dangerous” and “volatile” when describing an unexpected encounter between heavily armed, hostile forces at a sensitive time and place: “We have a potential situation developing along the Hungarian border.”
Which left us all praying that the Soviets didn’t maneuver us into the losing side of a potential situation gap.
So did Jewell “perform quality work when faced with a potential situation”? Certainly, but so do we all, every day, whether that work is outstanding, average or sub-par, and regardless of whether the outcome proves glorious, tragic or completely inconsequential.
The sentiment intended is, of course, that an alert police officer performed effective work that prevented a problem. The words “effective” and “problem” carry the moral value as part of their fundamental denotation — no inference, supposition or wishy-washing needed.
Several other words get this treatment. “Issue” comes to mind, as in “That family has issues,” where we start forgetting to wink at the neutral word so that it soon has to lug around the negative connotation wherever it goes.
As my fellow high school band trumpeter John Williamson paraphrased in our senior yearbook, “Of all the schools I’ve ever been to, this is certainly one of them.” (Hi, John.)
Now to the rhetorical legacy of Officer Jewell and the Centennial Olympic bombing.
I can’t name the specific culprit who originally saddled us with “person of interest.” I did a little digging, but couldn’t divine whether the phrase came from the media or the police first. They certainly share guilt for its spread in the early stages.
The police latched onto it because it seemed to let them say “suspect” without taking moral or legal responsibility for naming someone a suspect. The media let them get away with it.
Both the media and the police continue playing this spineless game. This week The Associated Press moved a story about a person of interest arriving in Anchorage from Texas, presumably as an honored traveling companion of the federal marshals who surrounded him the whole way.
The moral worthlessness of “person of interest” as a euphemism stands clear. To an extent, case law rejects it as legally worthless, too. Neither police nor news outlets can stave off a libel judgment simpy by arguing they never called someone a suspect.
I will call the inventor of the phrase a poltroon to their face and gladly embrace any consequences — pistols or swords, your call. Meanwhile the rest of us should stop letting it slide.
But maybe time will take care of it. Euphemisms have a way of deteriorating back to the original negative connotation their first users aimed at suppressing.
This effect can use up a whole string of words as one after another sinks into vulgarity. Thus the French, over a few centuries, have worked their way through every likely word for “kiss,” because sooner or later each one ends up meaning a far more intimate interaction.
See, I can euphemize, too.
I conclude with this sociolinguistic conundrum: Does the increasing acceptance of blasphemies such as “hell” and “damn” in polite speech during the last half century represent an opposite tendency for those words to lose a semantic taint, or does it just means the society throwing them around no longer abjures Satan and all his works?
Now there’s a damn quality issue.
Ceterum censeo “utilize” esse delendam.