The problem with language is hard to put into words.

 What we intend to mean often isn’t the sound from our mouths or what we write on paper or screen. But the mismatch between words and intent does not allow us to simply let all bad language use slide. There are words and phrases that glom onto my mind the way gum on the bottom of a shoe refuses to come off, but just gathers more and more grunge.

 I’m not talking here about those words I have never gotten a handle on, that I just simply do not understand or see the necessity of, even after having them explained slowly and patiently to me, e.g., existentialism, hegemony, mindfulness. 

No, the phrases stuck in my brain are terms I think I understand but cannot forgive. Really, no one, not even AI, should write  “How are older men tightening their skin for winter?” 

A website thrust that into my view, and I am flabbergasted. Am I, though not an older man, supposed to be tightening my skin? Every season? If AI did produce that, that’s more than sufficient reason to reject building data centers in the neighborhood.

 “Her enunciation of the Italian language was accent-free and pitiless as if each word were a butterfly she was shooting out of the air with a pistol.” 

My reading is abruptly halted. I’m horribly confused. The words were  butterflies? Who is doing the shooting?  If she is the shooter, whence the butterflies? How is that like her accent?  Are the butterflies pitiless? Why a pistol—will it show up again in the third act?  

These would be good “suggested questions” for book groups, which publishers have been adding to Oprah’s recommended books. 

The word “product” is wobbly and amorphous.  An old ice cream commercial’s voiceover asked smarmily, “Isn’t that a beautiful product?” 

It’s not a food, it’s a product. 

Sticking “process” onto any product results in stuff like processed cheese food product, which is no more cheese than the Middle Eastern “peace process” in the 1970s was peace.  

 Provitamin. Probiotics.  Many words beginning with “pro” just don’t work for my brain.  Think of office word processors. Put in innocent words, “process” them into corporate speak and what comes out is the verbal equivalent of pink slime: unappetizing, yet filling much of our bellies or brains. 

Once upon a time, charities used simple language, like “Help eliminate [insert random malady].”  Somewhere along the line, they began to request “awareness of” instead. “National [insert your favorite] Disease Awareness Month!  A Chance to Win FREE Merch & MORE!” 

Hooboy—free sickness awareness merch! I can hardly wait! 

A few years down the line, perhaps conceding that by now enough  people were  Aware[!], organizations seeking your money added on another label to promote and pat themselves on the back for their support:  “Recognition of Awareness of [name your poison].” Makes the simple “Walk for the Cure” almost tolerable. 

Of course, any comments about awkward language stylings cannot ignore the Mary Worth comic strip,  now in its hundred-thousandth iteration. (It has been hypothesized that some of the Lascaux cave paintings may have been proto-Mary Worth sketches.) While it was scandalous to learn the “Simpsons” TV show outsourced its drawings to Korean studios, it has been less known and less surprising that Mary Worth has been written for decades by underpaid, underage, under-English-fluent contract employees in Micronesia, as shown by lines like “I live in the neighboring town where I attend [Small State College] as a sophomore.”

Of course, neither public relations, literary fiction nor vintage comic strips can compete with politicians for garbling, diluting and squandering language.

They simply have a way with words that makes a mockery of meaning. 

“Weapons of mass destruction-related program activities”

“Committed to getting on the brink of a nuclear weapon”

“Operationalize”

“Concepts of a plan”

Not everyone is a graceful speaker or writer, nor do they have to be.  But using language with no intent to inform but to obfuscate is a pretty clear indication of unscrupulousness. When there is no meaning, the meaning cannot be questioned.

And we have to question that.