I have noticed over the last couple of days that the New York Times has run short of euphemisms. I don’t know if it’s because they used so many during the Trump years that they can’t come up with any more, but lately they’ve been running some euphemistic free articles in which Trump’s lies are referred to as—are you ready for this?— LIES!
Many of us thought that there was a policy against calling lies lies, but either that policy has been abandoned or the writers at the Times have simply abandoned any effort at originality and have come to the sad conclusion that they must fall back on the most accurate term.
I think we have to chalk this up to a lack of writing skills over at the Times, because I’ve checked with my Roget and there are plenty of artifices, indirectnesses, mollifications, obfuscations, overelaborations, pedantries, preciosities, and vague phraseologies that they have failed to use, such as cock-and-bull-story, inveracity (that’s a good one), mendacity, prevarication, song and dance (another good one), and trumped-up story (it’s really there!). The latter phrase has taken on a whole new meaning in the last few years!
Anyway, for whatever reason, so far as Trump is concerned, a lie is now a lie, and that’s apparently the case when Republicans repeat his lies, though euphemisms still prevail when Republicans tell their own homegrown lies. Still, it’s a start, a beginning, a step forward, a dawning, an initiation, a new departure, an onset, a point of departure, and a take off.
Afterword: I just paid $8.00 for a new Roget for my Ipad, as the one I had won’t run on the current IOS. I figured I had to get my money’s worth.
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