According to Webster’s, a euphemism is ‘the substitution of an agreeable or inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant.’ Very often, we use euphem

Are Children Being Kept in ‘Cages’ at the Border? A semantic debate is raging over what to call the pens where migrant kids are being held after separation from their parents.

By David A. Graham

Customs and Border Patrol via Reuters June 18, 2018

It’s hard to think of something more tangible than a child incarcerated in a tent city or a former Walmart building—and yet as the story of families being separated at the border mushrooms, one of the central questions has been a semantic one: whether the migrant children are being kept in cages.

Here’s what no one disputes: When the children are separated from their parents, they’re sent to facilities where they are kept in chain-link pens they can’t leave. But are those cages? It depends on whom you ask. 


For example, the Associated Press reported over the weekend: “Inside an old warehouse in South Texas, hundreds of children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing. One cage had 20 children inside. Scattered about are bottles of water, bags of chips and large foil sheets intended to serve as blankets.”

The AP is an influential news source. Because most local outlets around the country can’t send reporters to the border, they end up relying on stories from the AP to deliver the news to their readers. In addition, the wire service studiously aims for impartiality in language and reporting, and outlets around the world often adopt the AP’s guidance on language and usage. For the AP to deem the enclosures “cages” means that language will spread.

Breitbart, the faithful servant of the Trump White House’s messaging line, is well aware of this. On Sunday, editor Joel B. Pollak wrote a post devoted to criticizing the AP’s word choice. “The AP’s choice of words is only the latest in what appears to be a series of politically-charged word choices by the wire service,” he said, and contrasted the AP dispatch with a story in the Los Angeles Times that described “chain-link fenced holding areas.” Of course, these descriptions are not mutually exclusive, and the Times’ description defines a cage. Yet Pollak insisted that the correct terminology is “chain-link partition.”

Before taking center stage on Sunday, this debate had been slowly building for weeks. Earlier this month, The Washington Post’s fact-checkers scolded Senator Jeff Merkley for saying children were kept in cages, only to earn a counter-rebuke from MSNBC reporter Jacob

Soboroff, who tweeted, “I saw myself: there are kids, families and adults in cages, cells, kennels —whatever you call them. No question.”

The increasingly ontological cast of the debate continued Monday morning. Steve Doocy of Fox and Friends, the president’s favorite show, echoed Pollak’s line, saying that children weren’t being held in cages but that authorities had “built walls out of chain-link fences.” Meanwhile, CBS News’s Gayle King was reporting from the border, where she described “cages.” The Border Patrol, CBS reported, took issue with that description, not because they felt it was inaccurate, but because they were “very uncomfortable” with the implication that the children were being treated like animals.

The obvious counter to this is that being held in a cage with 20 other children and few comforts besides foil blankets is also very uncomfortable. But this is abuse of the language, too. Refusal to call a cage a cage merely because it makes someone uneasy—or, perhaps more importantly, because it is politically toxic—does not transform a cage into a “chain-link partition.”

The point is that these children are incarcerated.

The cages aren’t wholly new. During the Obama administration, unaccompanied immigrant children who arrived at the border were kept in them as well, as this tour by Representative Jim McGovern shows. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said unaccompanied minors would be deported, labeling the practice a deterrent. There was outcry at the time, especially from immigration groups, and the Obama White House was forced to stop detaining families by a court. What is different now is that the children being held are being forcibly separated from their parents at the border. So is the scale of the issue—the Washington Examiner reports that there could be 30,000 such children in custody by August.

This linguistic debate might seem like a distraction—and, in fact, it is. “If you’re arguing whether the children are in cages or windowless rooms, you’ve lost the plot,” the comedian Ziwe Fumodoh tweeted Sunday. But losing the plot as a matter of fact and morality and losing the political point are not the same. When the debate is focused on what to call the pens in which children separated from their families are being held, rather than the fact that children separated from their families are being held, it’s a victory for the Trump administration and its allies.

The “cage” fight is just one of a series of Orwellian deployments of language from the White House recently. On Sunday, for example, Homeland Security Secretary Kristjen Nielsen railed against “misreporting by Members [of Congress], press & advocacy groups” and tweeted:

We do not have a policy of separating families at the border.  Period.

— Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen (@SecNielsen) June 17, 2018 This is violence to the English language. The claim is that the policy is aimed at adults, not at children, but the effect is the same. In May, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the government would charge anyone entering the country illegally with a crime. Under the Flores agreement, a 1997 legal settlement, the federal government must hold children in the least restrictive setting possible. That means the government can’t imprison children alongside their parents.

The administration knew full well that the result would be separations. “If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally,” Sessions said in May. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly also said in May that the goal was to dissuade unauthorized immigrants from entering. “The laws are the laws. But a big name of the game is deterrence,” he told NPR. “It could be a tough deterrent—would be a tough deterrent.”

Nielsen’s words are at odds with her colleagues’ in the administration. They’re even at odds with her own. By Monday, she was defending the same policy she claimed didn’t exist, saying in New Orleans, “It’s important to understand that these minors are very well taken care of. Don’t believe the press.”

President Trump, meanwhile, continues to claim that the separations are somehow Democrats’ fault, even though Democrats do not control either house of Congress, the separations began only last month, and his claim has been repeatedly debunked. Trump continues to insist that he dislikes the policy and continues to blame his opponents, even though he could reverse the policy himself.

In a similar vein, first lady Melania Trump issued a statement Sunday that garnered a lot of attention as a criticism of the policy.

“Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform,” a spokeswoman said. “She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart.”

This, too, plays games with the truth, suggesting that the reason for the policy is that both parties won’t simply come together to pass immigration reform. But the battle in Congress over reform right now is mostly within the Republican Party, as moderates, conservatives, and leadership in the House fight over how to proceed on immigration.

In theory, the falsehoods in these statements ought to be plain—the representations by Donald and Melania Trump and Nielsen are simply wrong, while Sessions and Kelly are more honest, if politically reckless, in their comments. But the contradictions among high-level officials don’t bother the White House, which aims to stir up confusion rather than debate an issue it’s likely to lose. Hence the Surrealist proposition of the moment: Ceci n’est pas une cage.

David A. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

When Euphemism Disguises Truth: George Orwell’s Foresight December 21, 2014 by Bernard Weisberger

The battle over whether to apply the name of “torture” or “enhanced interrogation” to waterboarding, prolonged sleep deprivation, stress positions, extremes of hot and cold, and the entire bag of dehumanizing tricks devised by the CIA interrogators has far deeper import than a mere choice of which terms will pass the test of legality or avoid public revulsion.  The first label is cruel and honest. The second is a euphemism, a word or words that aim to disguise unappetizing truths or activities that fall under social taboo.

It isn’t always the devil’s spawn. We can still smile at the Victorian prudery regarding biological functions that would describe a pregnant woman as being “in an interesting condition,” even though we ourselves preserve traces of it to this day when we “go to the bathroom” for purposes very different from bathing.

When things have gotten to the point where “torture” is a forbidden term, euphemism is no longer a disguise for truth but an absolute enemy to it.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong about selling a “pre- owned” rather than a “used” car from an honest dealer. But describing overcrowded prisons rife with cruelty and corruption among both guards and inmates as “correctional” institutions edges into the shadowy terrain where pretty words to hide ugly facts become part of the ugliness. And from the moment years ago that I saw “collateral damage” as the description of innocent civilians murdered in the course of aerial bombing I hated it. If it was arguable that important military targets in crowded areas had to be destroyed, then journalists at least, unlike government propagandists, should have described non- military victims  as “civilian dead and wounded” simply to make us confront the actuality of war that any front line soldier learns on a battlefield full of corpses. When things have gotten to the point where “torture” is a forbidden term, euphemism is no longer a disguise for truth but an absolute enemy to it.

Let’s be clear. The purpose of language should be to clarify and explain the world as we see it.  The distortion of language by any means is to obfuscate, deny, and sometimes to create blind worship of fallen idols.  No one knew this better than the inventor of newspeak, doublespeak and the Ministry of Truth. In 1946, three years before he wrote Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell already had published his durable and brilliant essay, “Politics and the English Language,” which traced the ways in which bloated and vacuous writing serves the purposes of totalitarianism. Today, even sixty-eight years

later, it has kept its power and freshness. It ought to be required reading for anyone who reads or writes, and in the interest of public service we reprint an excerpt here.  

Excerpted From Orwell’s 1946 Essay: “Politics and the English Language”

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his

larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question- begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing

off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last 10 or 15 years, as a result of dictatorship.