‘Rapid unscheduled disassembly’: a potted history of great political euphemisms

After Elon Musk’s private spaceflight company SpaceX’s Starship rocket celebrated 4/20 by “blazing” itself into smoking ruins shortly after launch last week, the company reached for an interesting phrase. The process the rocket had undergone was not “exploding” but, apparently, “rapid unscheduled disassembly” — apparently a common enough saying in these circles, but one which got us thinking.

Anyone who is regularly called on to justify catastrophic failures, be it in the corporate or political world, will have to do this — fall back on euphemism, or what George Orwell called phrases intended to “name things without calling up mental pictures of them”. Here are a few great examples of euphemisms throughout history.

‘Economical with the truth’ 

This is a favourite of the British political class, with weird regularity, during politically charged legal cases while under examination from high-profile Australian lawyers. Before he was prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull made his name in the mid-1980s defending the Australian publisher of Spycatcher, the memoirs of a former MI5 agent, against British government action attempting to prevent its publication. This led to the following exchange involving then-UK cabinet secretary Robert Armstrong:

Turnbull: So that letter contains a lie, does it not?

Armstrong: It contains a misleading impression in that respect.

T: Which you knew to be misleading at the time you made it?

A: Of course.

T: So it contains a lie?

A: It is a misleading impression, it does not contain a lie, I don’t think.

T: What is the difference between a misleading impression and a lie?

…

A: A lie is a straight untruth.

T: What is a misleading impression — a sort of bent untruth?

A: As one person said, it is perhaps being economical with the truth.

A few years later, former UK minister Alan Clark went a step further, arguing he had been economical not with the truth but with “the actualité” in 1992 when he was under questioning from Geoffrey Robertson during the Arms-to-Iraq affair.

‘Detailed programmatic specificity’

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd once famously declared of Mandarin: “This fucking language! [It] just complicates it so much, you know. How can anyone do this?” We were surprised to find, over the course of his stewardship, Rudd was making that observation in a spirit of envy, not frustration. How else to explain him telling then German chancellor Angela Merkel that progress in the Major Economies Forum was unlikely to be “by way of detailed programmatic specificity”, let alone a commitment like:

There has to be a greater synergy between, let’s call it our policy leadership in this, which has been focused so much, legitimately, on targets and global architecture, almost reverse-engineered back to the means by which you can quickly deliver outcomes, and on the demand side in our economy we’re looking at potential advances in terms of the 20 to 25% range if you do this across the board. It all takes cost, but let me tell you it’s probably the quickest lever you can pull given the challenges we face.

‘Collateral damage’

An originally non-military term taken up by US armed forces with gusto during the Vietnam War, the passive description of civilians killed in battle is probably the best example of the ugliest use for political euphemism — during war. The use, by both US and Israeli forces, of the phrase “mowing the lawn” calls to mind Orwell once more, writing in 1946:

Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

‘Hiking the Appalachian Trail’

A special shout-out to the media team for former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford for unintentionally inventing a new euphemism in real-time. In 2009, Sanford went missing for six days. His media team assured anyone who asked that the governor “was hiking the Appalachian Trail”. Of course, that’s one way to put it. It emerged that he’d actually been in Argentina, in his telling, tearfully cheating on his wife. As Politico put it at the time:

In what were at times rambling remarks during an 18-minute news conference, Sanford delved into the nature of sin and explained his affinity for ‘adventure trips’.

He said that he spent ‘the past five days of my life crying in Argentina so I could repeat it to when I came back here.’

Other adventures in bureaucratic language

Among the horrors revealed by the robodebt royal commission — the program itself actually went by the far less vivid name of the “Online Compliance Initiative” — was the level of commitment to euphemism, even behind closed doors, about the implications of the policy. Former secretary of the Department of Human Services Professor Renée Leon told the hearings that if providing advice in writing couldn’t be avoided, it would be done “in a euphemistic way”.

So instead of saying, ‘This policy will cause significant hardship’, you might be expected to say something more like, ‘This policy will cause community concern’. So if that matter were to come out under freedom of information at a later stage, the minister couldn’t be accused of having turned a blind eye to the fact of significant hardship.

In 2013, a British system of welfare for disabled people referred to claimants as “stock” (the department’s delivery plan recommends using “credit reference agency data to cleanse the stock of fraud and error”). Benefit claimants were designated as living in “benefit units” rather than families, and a person who died while on a government work program would be designated as a “completer”.

You can add to that list “efficiency dividend”, “deficit levy” and along similar lines, the brief bipartisan commitment to renaming refugees and asylum seekers “people smugglers and their clients”.

Correction: A previous version of this piece incorrectly identified the spaceship that underwent “rapid unscheduled disassembly” as the Falcon 9. It was SpaceX’s Starship rocket. The article has been updated to reflect this.