The euphemism term “ethnic cleansing” should not be used in society because it covers up the emotion from its original word “genocide” which is mass murders being committed. Today’s English language euphemisms are used regularly unconsciously, and we don’t even notice that we use them in our everyday life. Euphemisms are used to substitute both words or phrases that people consider to be unpleasant or harsh. They are used not to express the truth to people but rather to mask the true meaning being these euphemisms. There are many types of euphemism that we use today and can either be a negative euphemism such as “ethnic cleansing”, or a positive euphemism depending in which context you use it.
An example of a positive euphemism is saying my cat “passed away” instead of it “died”, as you can tell it takes away some of its emotion and sadness from the sentence and does not sound as harsh. In the public media, you can hear the term “ethnic cleansing” being used which sounds like a way to better an ethnic group for example and sounds innocent. The original meaning to this phrase means genocide which is a horrible thing and would get a lot of attention compared to using the phrase ethnic cleansing.
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If you were to see this phrase as a title on a paper or website, you are going to be misled and wouldn’t think of it to be about a topic about genocide. As for if you were to see the word genocide, you can picture the many horror images of mass murders and understand what horrific event that has taken place. The massacre of one ethnic group has a lot of emotion and people would react in different ways if they use the genocide in media. You see how many euphemisms can lower the impact it has on its original meaning which I believe is a bad thing to do especially in this world. In the world when talking about harsh topics they may use euphemisms to control the quantity and quality of information that is being transmitted to the public’s ear.
They might want the public to have “negative” actions and continue to hide the whole truth to society and shifts the public’s eye onto something else. This type of euphemism is in a rhetorical device form known as litotes which softens or minimizes the negative meaning it originally has. I believe that people use these euphemisms to take the meaning of genocide or racial persecution which is something that is very harsh to do to innocent people that occurs around the world. This phrase should really matter to the world because it is a crime to kill a massive group of people and when this does occur, it mostly includes torture and is done in harsh ways among minority groups. I really dislike this euphemism because my people have a history of genocide and growing up I have lots of friends and family that were killed and had to witness what happens.
I heard this term being used on radio broadcast a couple of times but I didn’t know what the meaning was until they told the backstory, and it upset, I feel if they just use the word genocide or racial persecution it brings so much emotion and attention to the story. With the many misuses of euphemism in the English languages, destroys languages, takes the power and meaning away from words and phrases who people communicate different things and allows them to have control over how much information we know. The people in society all over the world deserves the right to be told the truth on what different events happens to people even if it is a horrific event such as this.
