According to The American Heritage College Dictionary, it’s the act of “substituting a mild, indirect or vague term for a harsh, blunt or offensive one.”  I also looked up the prefix “mis” which seems to be a great favorite these days among politicians and sports figures, as in “I misspoke” or “I guess I misremembered.”  I guess none of these folks looked at their dictionaries before they misinformed us or they would have known the prefix “mis” means bad or wrong or badly or wrongly. They seem to think it means “I made a mistake.” Or maybe we were just misunderstanding them.

Words today are so often misspelled, mispronunced and misused that it is useless to protest.

Some of the new terms are imaginative or amusing. I am actually beginning to like the misused phrase “for all intensive purposes.” I think it has its place, probably in virtual reality somewhere.

But, seriously, when did seriousness turn into gravitas and real into authentic? When did straightforward, straight talk slide down the hill into the creek to be replaced by pre-owned for used and surgery for operation? I suspect we have to blame soap operas for the last one, as in

“He has to have (hushed voice, rolled eyeballs) ‘surgery’ tomorrow.”

I think a lot of the fault lies within the corporate structures (businesses). A youngish businesswoman of my acquaintance recently sent me a Web site called Corporate BS (sorry) where I found a plethora of Dilbertian words neatly arranged in columns of adverbs, verbs, adjectives and nouns. Some are useful shortcut phrases, like 24/7 and best practices and B2B and turnkey. But I am underwhelmed by re-engineer and reinvent (excuse me, isn’t invent the first and only invention?) and if I hear globally or customize one more time, I may engage in some misconduct.

My friend’s company fires people by “riffing” them, i.e., RIF means “retired in force.” Somehow it calls up a vision of the handcuffed employee being escorted out of the building by a SWAT team. They also engage in “success-transfer,” which means I steal your idea and take credit for it at the big meeting this afternoon. But I tell you, “Hey I success-transferred your money-saving idea today!”

I regretfully admit I do like the phrase “fungible resources,” which means that everybody gets to do a zillion different jobs at different times because we don’t  have enough staff. I am feeling that way today about myself and my writing partner. Between vertigo and flimsy input from my muse, I feel very fungible.

Before I fade, I want to share two of my favorite euphemisms from TV ads. In one used cars are no longer pre-owned, they are now “previously loved” as in, “Hey, there’s my previously loved husband over there drinking martinis with a blonde.”

The other is an ad for wine featuring a picture and description of the oak casks in which spirits have been aged for centuries. Now we lucky viewers can have our own “casks” at home…wine in a box. Sorry, but I have a problem (uh, issue) with that.

But seriously, I’d like to leave you with a quote from Carl Jung’s biographer, “We feel it such a terrible crime in the West to counterfeit money…but it should be a worse crime to counterfeit words.”