Words that deny reality.

If you are ill at ease reading rantings against the linguistic abuses of our times, then I suggest you skip this month's Editor's Note and turn to the more meaningful content of the issue. But if you, too, have begun to wonder when words became the enemy of communication and the tools of obfuscation, read on and share the catharsis with me.

Language is supposed to be a means by which sentient beings capable of cognition communicate ideas, concepts, commands, and concrete images. But lurking beneath it all lies the human penchant for avoidance, lily gilding, and self-serving prose. During an otherwise delightful meal in a Philadelphia restaurant, this became obvious to me. The pretentiously oversized menu should have set me up for what was to follow, but I was still surprised by the first item, "Thai-style Cappellini." That's one heck of a concept. "Italian-style Curry" was not on the menu, but the second item was some dish with a "young baby chicken." A young baby chicken? Were they talking about deviled eggs?

The food was great, but every item on the menu was described in breathlessly inexact prose. Was there a fear that food for thought would be so filling that customers would not order a decent meal? Whatever happened to descriptive menus that told you what you were ordering? Menus have become more pompous than Henry Kissinger and equally candid in telling you what they represent, and as a result there are lots of nice-sounding words carefully strung together to provide images that really describe nothing.

Restaurants are not alone in using words to avoid reality. As I recently bounced around in a commuter plane crossing the frighteningly high Wasatch Mountains, I made the mistake of consulting Skywest's in-flight magazine. There I learned that the plane I was in offered "An intimate cabin with many advantages of larger aircraft, the 19-passenger Metro allows every passenger to enjoy both a window and an aisle seat." In other words, the circumference of the fuselage is so small there are two narrow seats separated by an aisle that bears a striking resemblance to the gutter that lies along a bowling lane.

I can see why the airline felt a need to avoid an accurate description. On the Metro, passengers get to recapitulate evolution by knuckle walking on and off because they dare not walk Homo sapiens style for fear of crashing their skulls into the roof of the cabin. But why couldn't the airline avoid the temptation to obfuscate and simply say that the small plane allowed for service that would not otherwise be financially feasible to communities in need of an air service?

My concern is that we have become accustomed to using language to avoid reality. The strategy in the restaurant and for the airline was not to describe, but rather to hide and to pander. Tell people what they want to hear, and they might see the world differently. Hot sauce being a dangerous condiment, I recently read the labels on two different brands, only to see the following strange ingredient: "edible food stabilizers." I was comforted to know they hadn't added inedible food stabilizers, but then I realized edibility should be the consumer's judgment. And then I really understood what they were talking about. Gone were all those nasty chemical names people hate to see, and in their place was not a description, but rather a conclusion.

This business of using words for the purpose of not communicating is as old as Adam and Eve. A careful re-reading of Genesis reveals that more than a fair share of characters tried to fool God with careful linguistic feats of derring-do (remember, for example, the purpose of asking, Am I my brother's keeper?). Apparently, we are in a good company when we are on the receiving end of slippery prose offered in lieu of communication.

Unfortunately, airlines, restaurants, and hot-sauce purveyors are not the only ones who know how to use words to steer us clear of understanding or to puff up communications. Think of the phrases we serve up daily in notes and verbal dalliances. Patients deny things when in reality they simply say they never had something. We talk of symptomtology when "symptoms" would do, and of course we incorrectly use the word parameter whenever possible, even though more suitable words abound. There are parameters for electrical stimulation because it is too mundane to talk about machine settings, and we study parameters of gait because if we talked about variables, our fancy equipment might seem less fancy.

Actually, my favorite silly usage occurs when we talk about patients presenting with things. I just cannot shake the image of the credit roll before those old movie spectaculars when giant letters proclaimed that some producer was presenting something. Did Mrs Schwartz really present with a hip fracture a la a Las Vegas chorus line, or did she just have a hip fracture?

Enough with the complaining and whining on my part--as Genesis attests, even more powerful beings than journal editors have had little effect on getting others to behave. So what can we do to stop the fanciful juxtaposition of usage and meaning? Perhaps we need to turn elsewhere and accept that not only will peace begin with each of us, but so will the proper use of language.

Words provide an invisible link among us all, and we become dose when the words allow us to share visions based on interaction and communication. But as Joseph Goebbels noted, words can also create false realities, and well-crafted lies can lead to big lies with mighty consequences. I fear not just the big lies, but the growing acceptance of a premise that communication is secondary in the use of language. Abuse too often is seen as a virtue when sentences are clever, the language is overblown, and adjectives and verbs are a means to an end. How else could we explain, for example, recent television ads for pagers that proclaim they are portable. I guess the pitch must be for those of us tired of using pagers that were not portable. . .?