The United Nations has cautioned that there may soon be no new phrases left to distract from what is happening in Gaza, with thesauruses across the globe stretched to breaking point.
“Terms such as ‘military presence’, ‘voluntary immigration’ and ‘bombs are falling’ have done a lot of heavy lifting since the ‘conflict’ started. But as reporting on the ‘humanitarian crisis,’ continues, people may be looking for new terms,” a UN spokesperson explained.
Linguistic expert Sarah Thurgood said there were only so many ways you could describe genocide without saying genocide. “All the best euphemisms have been mined already. ‘Evacuation’, ‘Defensive efforts’, ‘Chaotic scenes’, ‘Lives have been lost’, ‘Border unrest’, ‘Died from wounds’ – they’ve all been used already. There aren’t too many left”.
But others are not concerned, saying that the answer to the shortage is recycling. “What we’ve found is that we can use these terms again and again and no-one minds,” one journalist said. “Plus, never underestimate human ingenuity – we’ll invent new terms to deal with any shortage of ways to describe the ‘situation in the Middle East’.
