The Great Transfer - Euphemisms and National Identity

Euphemisms are strange things, especially in a business environment.

For example, at my workplace bathroom breaks have two euphemisms: 'comfort breaks' and 'personal time'. They can't just say bathroom breaks, no, of course not, but the terms they do use summon forth entirely different images than that of people going to the bathroom; a comfort break sounds like the opportunity to leave your desk and jump into some massive pink bed and wrap yourself in soft, fluffy duvets, whereas personal time sounds like the time a teenage boy spends in front of his computer when he thinks his parents are in bed...

We have a lot of these kinds of things throughout society though, don't we? I remember taking Food Technology at school and being thoroughly disappointed, because what I got was certainly less than I'd expected. I wanted to create Royal icing robots and Marzipan monitors, not cakes and scones.

(As it was, I managed to subvert the lessons wherever I could, creating such monstrosities as chocolate bread, green-based pizzas and mousses which not only didn't set, but also had quite disturbing gelatinous lumps...)

We are a society that does not want to call a spade a spade; it's a Landscaping Aid. It saturates everything that we do, so that bin men are Waste Management Engineers, call handlers are Personal Incident Managers and complete fuckwits are called Members of Parliament.

Maybe it's because there are people who won't ever be able to advance beyond their lowly stations in life, so we try to make those stations sounds better than they really are. It's kind of like lying to them and ourselves; we don't have to allow the fact that some people just aren't good enough into our world view, where anyone can become famous, as long as those who don't make it get cool-sounding jobs.

The thing is, it's only in fiction where anyone can do anything if they just try; in reality, only people with the will, drive and determination to improve themselves, push themselves and get what they want will get what they want! And, quite frankly, many people just don't have anything like that level of drive.

And that's probably why we, as British people, only like the underdogs, because they are like us; they've not put in the hard work of the 'overdog', nor do they have the talent or training, but we want them to win in spite of that. Because we're fundamentally lazy and want to be able to get what we want whilst being very unlikely to do so.

This is going to be slowly beat out of us in the next few years, I think, as London 2012 approaches. Having come 4th in the medal table as Beijing, people want more; we've remembered that winning feels good, and praising winners feels just as good and this feeling is an addictive one to a nation.

Maybe it's too much, but I'm hoping for a slight cultural revolution from London 2012. I don't want us to go to the extreme of the Yanks (USA!USA!USA!USA!), but we should raise winners and instill a winning attitude into our young people, right?

Show Johnny Foreigner what for, ey chaps?