Steve Crescenzo wrote in The Ragan Report last month about a health care communicator who was not permitted to say anything negative in her publication. “I’m not even allowed to write that anyone died,” she sputtered helplessly. “I can’t use the words ‘died’, ‘dying’ or ‘death.’ If a patient dies, I have to say that he or she ‘failed to thrive.’”

Steve then mischievously offered up a series of other possible feel-good euphemisms that might be employed when writing about certain unpleasant hospital procedures – none of which I feel safe repeating here. So I’ll stick with “failed to thrive.”

Whenever I read a weasel expression like that, I think of George Orwell’s classic essay, “Politics and the English Language.”

Writing over 60 years ago, Orwell declared: “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.”

But we can do something about it, said Orwell. From time to time, if we jeer loudly enough, we can send some lump of verbal refuse like “failed to thrive” to the junk heap, where it belongs.

He was right.

In addition to Steve Crescenzo’s stalwart effort in The Ragan Report, we can take heart from the example of Winston Churchill

As leader of the opposition after World War II, Churchill was frequently exasperated by the bureaucratic jargon employed by the new socialist regime.

He bit his tongue when the poor were referred to as “the lower income disadvantaged,” but when houses and homes were dubbed “local accommodation units”, he lost all patience.

"Accommodation unit, sweet accommodation unit. What rubbish,” he declared – and buried the offending euphemism on the spot.