Words You’re Entitled, Empowered to Substantially Abuse

A reader, Elvira Stark, writes plaintively to ask my help in defining several words and phrases that keep turning up in her newspaper and that she does not understand.

In asking me for help, Ms. Stark is leaning on a frail reed indeed. I, too, am baffled by many of the words that seem to be the substance of news stories and editorial punditry.

Specifically, Ms. Stark asks about these: politically correct, empowerment, ethnic cleansing, entitlements, affirmative action, infrastructure, significant other and substance abuse.

It’s true that these terms are all quite commonplace in today’s news columns and on radio and TV, but few of them were ever seen or heard a few years ago.

“I thought it was their function to communicate,” Ms. Stark complains. “Instead we receive the news in code. They invent words and phrases and use them without bothering to define them.”

She is right. The media take to vogue words the way kids take to candy, but one is supposed to get their meaning by textual inference, a highly unreliable method.

I think I know the meaning of some of Ms. Stark’s elusive eight, but not all. Just for the sport of it, I’m not looking up any of the definitions--just guessing, which is what most of us do.

Significant other, I believe, is that person, friend or spouse, with whom one is physically and emotionally involved. Significant other belongs to that extensive vocabulary of therapy known as psychobabble.

Substance abuse is the excessive use of alcohol or the use of such drugs as cocaine or crack in any amount. Whereas the term used to be drug addiction, it is now substance abuse, perhaps because it is thought to be more politically correct.

Infrastructure is everything that makes a community work: streets, subways, hospitals, schools. Of course I’m only guessing. Infrastructure began to turn up a year or two ago, and it was rampant during the 1992 campaign. Everybody’s infrastructure seemed to be going to hell.

Affirmative action. I really don’t know how affirmative action is different from any other kind of action. Was the bombing of the World Trade Center not affirmative action?

Entitlements are what you’re entitled to, aren’t they? Social Security. Health care. Pensions. However, that doesn’t seem right. We’re not entitled yet to health care, are we? As I understand it, we have to take money from our entitlements to put into our infrastructure, or it will all fall down.

Ethnic cleansing means eliminating those people who are not of your ethnic background or religion by killing them. This is a term that I do not remember hearing before it became popular with the Serbs in Bosnia, though the practice itself is as old as history.

Empowerment. That means when you empower someone. I have an idea it means more than that, but I don’t know what. It sneaked up on me.

Politically correct is a term that covers an entire lexicon of words and phrases that are contrived to avoid offending anyone at all in the least. This sort of super-clean language has had a vogue on college campuses, but it is sometimes carried to silly extremes.

Numerous booklets of PC language have been published for the guidance of students and employees. George W. Hunt, editor of the Jesuit publication America, recently confessed that his interest in DWEMs (Dead White European Males) probably makes him unfit for the classroom. He quotes several terms from a PC manual (“Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook”), which has “proved a godsend and sent my sensitivity quotient sky-high.”

A few of the more ingenious entries:

Elderly: Chronologically gifted or experientially enhanced.

Stupid: Cerebrally challenged or differently logical.

Poor: Economically exploited or differently advantaged.

Illiterate: Alternatively schooled.

Girl: If 12 or older, woman. A female 11 years or younger is a prewoman.

Girl watching: Street harassment.

“There,” Hunt asks, “don’t you feel better already? Once verbally equipped, you will not only be politically correct but also culturally sensitive, appropriately inclusive and, yes, indeed, multiculturally unexceptionable and non-co-opted by the white power elite. Good for you.”

In commenting on a similarly absurd PC list some time ago, Chicago columnist Mike Royko noted that fried chicken was among the terms deplored because it evidently had some insensitive connection with blacks. “Fried chicken, fried chicken, fried chicken,” said Royko. “There. I said it, and I’m glad.”

Though I try not to call grown women girls , I love the word. It falls trippingly off the tongue and is wonderfully evocative of youth and girlish charm. If it’s all the same to you, I’m going to continue calling girls girls until they’re at least 18.

Girls! Girls! Girls!

As for girl watching, it is an entitlement. As Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, then 90, said to a colleague when a young secretary walked by them on Pennsylvania Avenue, “Oh, to be 70 again!”

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After he wrote today’s column, Jack Smith suffered a heart attack. He is recovering at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena. His next column will appear when he recuperates.