The one that horrified me today was the phrase “cost of living”. It’s right in front of our faces that it literally costs money to remain alive.

Yeah that one gets me all the time too. Liberals are all the time about “Human life don’t have a price” and then they not only slap pricetag on everything human needs to remain alive, but they even price, by the hour, week, month, the worker’s time, their life itself.

And then they freak out at the term “wage slavery”.

I sometimes think about euphemisms for things that operate to negate their true nature and make them palatable for populaces that need their consentanufactured.

“Defense” used to describe all military expenditures and structures, particularly for the United States, which has spent nearly all of its “defense” efforts on aggression and territorial domination thousands of miles from its borders. It is conspicuous in how diligently it is used by certain groups, particularly large corporate media orgs, think tanks, and bourgeois politicians. There is, at minimum, an unconscious recognition that (the “good guys’”) war must always be framed in the language of defense. For them to describe, for example, the wars on Iraq or Afghanistan as wars of aggresson, which they absolutely were even by liberal definitions, is almost unthinkable. No, the “bunker busters” used exclusively on foreign countries must be “defense”.

“Heritage” to describe a white supremacist pining for chattel slavery in the South. Goes hand in hand with, “the peculiar institution” and “states’ rights”.

The (very deep, usually unconscious nowadays) allusions to vast “natural” spaces that were actually occupied by indigenous people for millennia. Indigenous people that faced a genocide by the same institutions that designate the spaces as official wilderness for its own members. Spinning a deep fiction around the meaning and history of these spaces.

A lot of language is like this. Whitewashed to avoid the horror of what they really mean.

“Human Resources” need I say anything more

Probably not a very creative one, but “landlord” shocked the hell out of me when I first moved to the anglo-sphere. Not sure why it never really registered with me before, but when my then flatmate handed me my tenants-agreement and told me about our landlord something just clicked. Still remember looking at him, thinking “my land…what the fuck”. No idea how this isn’t more inflamatory to anglos.

“Illegals, illegal immigrant, border hopper, etc.” About as dehumanizing and awful as you can get regarding living breathing human beings who are trying to escape hellholes that the intelligence services and armies that your country created.

“Labour Market”, people can be bought and sold like cattle then disposed of when their use is up. Completely disregarding the devastating effects this has on human life.

“Less then lethal weapons” regarding chemical weapons that are banned in international warfare, acoustic weapons that can permanently deafen or kill, tasers that will still kill a person, blinding pepper spray, and batons that can beat a person to within an inch of their life.

“Medical debt” or “alien” when referring to humans

I hadn’t thought about it that way before. Yikes.

Just look at the way western media uses the word “violence.” Broken windows? Violence. Peaceful protest outside the homes of unreachable un-elected judges? Violence. Homelessness? Lack of healthcare? Redlining? Oh well, that’s just the way things are.

“Humane” is the one I always come back to. It’s usually used as an adjective when doing horrible things.

To preface: you are not overthinking. Quite the opposite. There are many terms and phrases that get thrown around, whose definition is just kind of “generally understood”. Freedom. Democracy. Justice. Try asking a liberal for a definition. They will most likely glare at you, glass eyed, for a second, because to them such terms don’t require a definition - they are instinctively accepted.

That is one of the great things Marx and Engels had done - they started digging into such generally accepted terminology from a scientific standpoint. To not be empty worded - in “Critique of the Gotha program”, Marx takes apart, one by one, specific points of the social democratic party’s program and shows why they make zero sense. “All workers must receive just pay” - and what does “just” mean? Who decides what is “just”? Etc.

And back topic of the thread, comrades have covered some examples that get me already, but there’s one specific (I think) to corporate speak. Back when I worked for a yankee corporation, we had these annual “training sessions” - a series of 40-minute-or-so-long courses with a test attached. The topics were “Sanctions” (aka why you must follow the US policies against sanctioned countries), “Workplace harassment”, “Slavery” (aka what to do if you think there’s slavery afoot), etc. The latter two sound reasonable, right?

But here’s the kicker. The courses had a general name of Compliance. Perhaps even “Compliance course” or “Compliance training”, my memory is a bit fuzzy. Such a scummy term. Like being threatened with a shotgun, but it’s pink and made with eco friendly materials. Compliance. Comply, wage slave. Bow down. Kiss the ring. Or else.