The Light is Darker Than it Appears

Abstract

It is ironic that, in this, the Age of Communication, instantaneous global access should be confounded, in what appears to be a quasi Newtonian fashion, by an equally powerful, pervasive, and pernicious force for obfuscation. The insinuation of rebadging through euphemisms or adoption of market jargon into the medical culture has achieved a displacement of clear and nondisputational terms and titles with those that are, for the most part, meaningless and irrelevant. I have, slowly, of necessity, adapted to the fact that the Personnel Department is now Human Resources. At the risk of establishing a new and more profound degree of personal naïveté, I actually wondered when first seeing this upstart term whether there were also departments of Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral Resources. What were these Human Resources—a tissue or organ bank? This was not my first exposure to inane euphemisms. During my previous editorship of another journal, the Subscription Department was renamed Fulfillment—and still is! Ergo happiness is guaranteed by receiving one’s journal in a timely fashion. I recently discovered a section of Human Resources that deals with the obligatory gift on retirement known as Leisure Lifestyle— little do they know! Renaming can lead to efficiency, such as the abandonment of steward and stewardess in favor of flight attendant. In other instances, it is presumptuous: janitor/custodian became sanitary engineer. And, taken to a darkly humorous extreme: prostitute as sex-care provider.