"Beware of euphemisms. Radical changes in vocabulary are usually admissions that reality is unwelcome or indefensible."

In American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson writes about Changing Reality with Words.

...Global warming was once a worry about too much heat. It implied that man-made carbon emissions had so warmed the planet that life as we knew it would soon be imperiled without radical changes in consumer lifestyles.

Yet in the last 30 years, record cold spells, inordinate snow levels and devastating rains have been common. How to square that circle?

Substitute “climate change” for global warming. Presto! Any radical change in weather could be perceived as symptomatic of too much climate-changing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Suddenly, blizzards, deluges and subzero temperatures meant that typically unpredictable weather was “haywire” because of affluent Westernized lifestyles.

...By the 1980s, a new and vaguer term, “diversity,” had increasingly replaced “affirmative action.”

...“Illegal alien”—a term still used by official government agencies—described any foreign national residing in the U.S. without government sanction. But when the numbers of those who fit the old classification grew, and the number of people invested in relaxed immigration policies expanded across the political spectrum, the term gradually metamorphosed.

If “alien,” a Latinate word deriving from the idea of “other” or “different,” sounds too outer space-like, why not substitute “immigrant”? Yet “illegal immigrant” still sounded as if breaking federal immigration laws was somehow a serious legal matter. So the vague “undocumented immigrant” superseded the old term.

...Often, “undocumented” was dropped, leaving just “immigrants”—conflating applicants who waited years for legal entry with those who swarmed the border illegally.

Increasingly we now hear just “migrants”—a vague term that further divorces illegal immigration from reality by conflating the acts of leaving and entering the country.

Democrats used to self-identify as “liberals.” The Latin etymology means “free,” as in the context of “free” thinkers not burdened by oppressive traditions, ideological straitjackets and unworkable norms.

...“liberal” included little notion of evolution and advancement. So gradually, “progressive” has eclipsed the stuffy “liberal.”

“Progressive’ infers an activist, not a neutral, ideology—one that is always moving the country in the supposedly correct direction.

...Beware of euphemisms. Radical changes in vocabulary are usually admissions that reality is unwelcome or indefensible.

Read more here.