The committee room smelled of lemon-scented disinfectant and the faint metallic tang of the projector that had been left running too long. On the table lay a document titled “Inclusive Language Guidelines (Third Edition),” its margins crowded with tracked changes that transformed “the elderly” to “senior citizens” to “seasoned individuals” in the space of three revisions. The chairperson tapped her pen against the phrase “cost-cutting measures,” suggesting they might better serve stakeholder engagement as “right-sizing opportunities.” No one laughed. This was not satire. This was Tuesday.

There was a time when English allowed you to call a spade a spade. The word meretricious once did more than describe something gaudy - it carried the full weight of its Latin root meretrix, implying the tawdry seductions of a prostitute. Now we say “inauthentic” and consider the job done. The strongest defense of this shift is that language evolves toward efficiency, that cumbersome Latinate terms slow communication in a fast-moving world. This is half true. What actually happens is more sinister: we don’t eliminate difficult words, we repurpose them as instruments of evasion. Lachrymose survives not in poetry but in corporate memos - “the lachrymose tone of recent feedback” - where it performs the double duty of sounding authoritative while obscuring whose tears are being discussed, and why.

Consider the fate of oleaginous. In 1923, a Times Literary Supplement reviewer could dismiss a politician’s speech as “oleaginous nonsense” and every reader would taste the unctuous smear of false sincerity. Today the same speech earns a bland “tone-deaf” in Twitter threads, while oleaginous thrives in HR manuals describing “appropriate workplace demeanor.” The word hasn’t disappeared; it’s been weaponized against itself. This isn’t linguistic Darwinism - it’s linguistic laundering.

The bureaucratic appropriation of precise terms creates a kind of gaslighting. When a government report describes civilian casualties as “collateral demographic adjustments,” it’s not avoiding the word dead out of sensitivity. It’s ensuring that when you try to say dead, the phrase will sound melodramatic, even hysterical, compared to the measured cadence of institutional euphemism. Orwell saw this coming. The modern twist isn’t that we replace torture with enhanced interrogation techniques - it’s that after enough repetitions, torture itself starts to sound like an activist’s overstatement.

The counterargument from linguists is formidable: all living languages simplify over time, and attempts to preserve archaic vocabulary are elitist at best, reactionary at worst. But this confuses simplification with obfuscation. When Chaucer’s eyren became Shakespeare’s eggs, communication gained clarity. When propaganda became public relations, clarity was the first casualty. The real elitism lies in pretending that only experts should have access to precise language - that the public can’t handle perfidious but will somehow navigate post-truth without a map.

The most insidious effect is the silencing of dissent through vocabulary attrition. You can still call a lie a lie, but try it in a boardroom and watch how quickly the room adjusts its posture. The unspoken consensus will label you truculent, a word that survives precisely to pathologize those who refuse the new etiquette. Meanwhile, mendacious - which might have indicted the lie itself - collects dust in the OED, preserved like a museum piece behind glass.

What’s lost isn’t just lexical richness but the ability to make moral distinctions. Specious and false both mean untrue, but specious implicates the speaker - it’s a lie dressed in reasoning’s clothing. We surrender this distinction at our peril. When a pharmaceutical executive describes a drug’s “unanticipated adverse outcomes,” he’s counting on you not to reach for fraudulent. The words exist. We’ve been trained not to use them.

Language is not a democracy. Some words carry more weight because they’ve earned it. Next time someone suggests “economical with the truth” where lying would do, give them mendacious and watch them flinch. They’ll understand it perfectly.