Sesame Street is adding a new Muppet. Lily is described as having “food insecurity”. In other words her family is poor and she is hungry.
Lily will make her first appearance in a PBS special this weekend alongside well-known characters including Big Bird and the rest as they try to shed a light on millions of little kids who go hungry. Good for them. It’s a terrible thing to have kids going without enough food.
But food insecurity? It’s great that PBS is adding a character whose life isn’t all sweetness and light because it’s estimated there are millions of children who don’t know when they’re going to eat next. But they’re simply hungry. They haven’t eaten. They aren’t insecure in a food way. I can’t stand it when clear and blunt terminology is softened and made to sound less brutal. Being hungry must be awful. That any child goes hungry is unforgivable. Having food insecurity just sounds so gentle and so unlike a growling stomach belonging to a hungry child.
George Carlin did a now-classic bit about softening our language. He took us through the way “shell shock” evolved into “battle fatigue” and then “operational exhaustion”. Carlin made a good case for Vietnam Vets receiving less help for their post-war traumas as the language devolved into wimpy and light-sounding euphemisms. The dump has become the landfill. Dying became pass away. Slavery became human trafficking. And so on. Now it’s hunger. Somehow the less startling phrase of food insecurity has come to replace the very real, very blatant and unmistakable word: hunger. It’s a crying shame is what it is.
I will have to strongly disagree with your interpretation of “food insecurity” and that of “hunger”. “Food insecurity” is a psychological illness stemming from being deprived of food such as those in concentration camps, or POW camps which weighs on the conscience throughout their lives. “Hunger” is a physiological very real, very blatant disease within society and both are very real.
However I do also strongly agree with you that in our efforts to dumb down the language in an effort not to offend anyone, we’ve lost the sense of urgency required to address the issue of “hunger” and many others. And if you think of it, who truly benefits from dumbing down the language, the politicians! If we used language which in raged society, the politicians feet would more likely be held to the fire to address the issues.