Euphemism is a euphemism for lying, Bobbie Gentry

March 26, 2026

I don’t know whether I was amused, alarmed, offended or entertained by something which happened to me last week sitting as a Recorder. A witness was absent and I asked if the man in question had provided a sick note. Prosecuting counsel informed me with a straight face that they are not called ‘sick notes’ anymore, they are now called ‘fit notes’.

We have a problem with language in our time. I noticed years ago that we had started slightly inflating people’s job titles so that their jobs sounded rather grander than they in fact were. That inflation became steadily more persistent so that nowadays when someone tells you what they do at work, the title is often unintelligible and it is embarrassing to ask what the person actually does.

As my non-lawyer friends point out, part of this arises from the English class system. Sybil, an old friend who is a veteran class warrior, said: ‘You bloody barristers don’t have to worry about your social standing. Even if you’re not posh, everybody thinks you are.’ But like the deadly alien plant in the Quatermass series of films, the vice slithers and creeps into every nook and cranny. The most eccentric example is surgeons. Once despised as butchers, they were not called ‘Dr’. They came to ‘own’ their non-doctoral titles. The ‘Mr’, ‘Miss’, ‘Mrs’, ‘Ms’ Surgeon became itself a form of superiority. The dentists, however, became confused. They were dental surgeons, and, thus, Mister. This might, however, be misunderstood to mean some lack of specialist qualification, so increasingly they have become ‘Dr’. Even some surgeons are having second thoughts…

Sybil and I agreed that the more pernicious development is where words are positively distorted and misused in some effort to deceive or to attempt some kind of haphazard social engineering. Of course, language changes over time. We all have one or two words which we thought for a long time meant something else. I can remember two – both highly embarrassing.

In my brief teaching career, one of my students, who was rather superior of manner and reminded me of the perspicacious girl (Sandy) in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, came to see me on an unbearably sticky day. ‘Isn’t the weather enervating?’ she said. For some reason, I thought it meant ‘energising’. ‘Rather the opposite I would have thought,’ was my reply. We argued about the word’s meaning. I took down a dictionary saying: ‘It is really important to understand the meaning of words, Alexandra.’ Oh dear.

The second was ten years later in a Crown Court where the judge said to me after a rather daring submission: ‘In all my years as a Crown Court judge Mr Byfield, that is the most meretricious submission I have ever heard.’ ‘How extremely kind of your Honour,’ I replied, thinking the word meant meritorious. Something in the judge’s expression caused me to look the word up when I returned to Chambers. Oh dear, again. The really frightening thing is how many other words we might be harbouring under false pretences.

Likewise, cultural differences between nations, even those speaking the same language, can produce strange results. A friend in their senior years showed me yesterday a Metro ticket they had been issued with on holiday in North America which, instead of saying ‘Single’ as it would here, had typed above the price: ‘Good for 1 Ride in Either Direction’. Here it might give rise to a number of misinterpretations.

But when we forcibly change the meaning of words, that is another matter. It affects so many other things and some of these changes are profound. The use of comedy as a mirror to show us things we need to think about is now ostracised because its meaning is taken literally. Comedians from the right and the left make this point with increasing urgency. Politicians worldwide treat justified questioning with contempt, disdain and either a refusal to answer or a particularly indigestible word salad, hardly disguising the fact that they are not even attempting to answer the question. Politicians dodging questions is nothing new, but the brazenness of it now is.

Many of us feel that this carries through to the most extreme situations. For instance, wars being described by more than one major power as special military operations to avoid potential legal consequences. The Ministry of Justice has its own special military operation presently against the public over the legislation restricting jury trials. The MOJ is also seemingly having difficulty with language, explaining the justification for this masterplan…