Have a problem with a nasty name?
Call it something else.
What does swine flu have in common with American International Group (AIG)? For that matter, what do AIG and the flu share with global warming and No Child Left Behind?
All of them have what a shrink might describe as image issues. And in each instance, a favored solution seems to be to give the problem a new name, and just hope for the best.
Take swine flu, which turned up in pockets of New York City. Confirmed cases have been mild. At St. Francis Preparatory, a school in Queens where some students became ill, officials felt confident enough to reopen on Monday after a week’s shutdown.
The illness is called swine flu because scientists say that most of its genetic material comes from viruses that infect pigs. But the name makes some bureaucratic types queasy. “Swine flu” sounds awful. The WHO is asking everyone to call the disease by its scientific name, A(H1N1).
But A(H1N1), in addition to sounding like an affliction peculiar to R2D2, does not exactly trip lightly off the tongue.
A WHO spokeswoman acknowledged as much the other day, suggesting that we all try to come up with a more “user friendly” name. We could even have a competition, she said.
Oh goody, we like game shows. How about “Name that Flu”? We’ll get the ball rolling. Let’s try Animals with Cloven Hooves Odious Outbreak — ACHOO, for short. Anyone can remember that.
(We also recommend that new flu cases in New York be put under quarantine in the sections of Yankee Stadium that the team avariciously tried to sell for US$2,500 a seat per game. You can sit in splendid isolation there.)
AIG, the New York-headquartered company that is now 80 percent owned by taxpayers, also sees a name change as an answered prayer.
Two months ago it rechristened its big insurance unit as American International Underwriters. That tweaking apparently did little good. Company executives say further rebranding is needed, but they have yet to say what it might be.
Wary taxpayers can only hope that it isn’t something like American International Undertakers.
Similarly, US Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said that the No Child Left Behind law could do with a new name. No change has been announced. Presumably, the secretary is not considering a truly reality-based name — something along the lines of, say, the We’re So Desperate In Our Schools That We’ll Do Anything Act.
As for global warming, a marketing company in Washington was reported the other day as having concluded that the very phrase “global warming” was a turnoff for many people. Better, it advised, to talk about “our deteriorating atmosphere.” Right. Words like “our deteriorating atmosphere” aren’t going to scare anyone half to death.
These efforts are the latest in a long tradition of slapping new labels on problems in the risible belief that things will get better as a result.
Decades ago, someone decided that people without a dime in their pocket wouldn’t feel so bad about being poor if they were described as “disadvantaged.” And poverty-stricken countries, we’ve been led to believe, do better when they are called “developing nations.”
Lost your job? The company didn’t fire you; it laid you off. The economy isn’t shrinking; it’s experiencing “negative growth.” When US soldiers accidentally kill their buddies, it is called “friendly fire.” Horses that go lame are “euthanized.” Prisons morphed long ago into “correctional facilities.” Pouring water over a terror suspect to make him fear he will drown is called “waterboarding”; it sounds like something they might do off the Malibu coast. Also, don’t call it torture. It is an “enhanced interrogation technique.”
The list could go on. Nor is the euphemizing confined to this city or this country. One of my favorites was a phrase used by Emperor Hirohito of Japan to describe his country’s brutal occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. The emperor referred to it 25 years ago as “an unfortunate past.” Quite.
In much the same way, the efforts under way now to rename swine flu and the others amount to little more than trying to put lipstick on a pig.
Oops. After the uproar over that phrase in the last presidential election, are we allowed to use it?
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