> George Carlins "soft language" specifically spells out an example; shell-shock, battle fatigue -> Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
I’ve always thought that this was a bad example of the euphemism treadmill, because each step is clearly an attempt to be more general than the last. The name makes it clear that this isn’t just a disorder you’ll find in soldiers at constant fear of being shelled at any moment (shell shock); nor even of soldiers who’ve seen the horrors of battle generally (battle fatigue); but rather that anyone who has been through any kind of chronic, fearful stress under the constant expectation that some traumatizing event might happen at any moment, is liable to end up experiencing these symptoms.
Or, to put it more viscerally: doctors would be wary of diagnosing a victim of domestic abuse with “shell shock.” But “PTSD” — not just as a symptom profile, but also as a name for that symptom profile, and a set of social connotations around that name — clearly fits.
> CSAM
This is actually an example of a completely different effect: it’s a cultural shibboleth. Police want to use automatic word filters to discover and surface conversations between pedophiles, while not triggering those filters with their own conversations about the pedophiles’ activities. So they have invented a word that is equivalent to the generic term in meaning, but part of “policing language.” (And, as a special trick, it’s a term with no potential for a treadmill effect, as pedophiles would be loath to use a term that frames them as perpetrators of abuse.)
> Or, to put it more viscerally: doctors would be wary of diagnosing a victim of domestic abuse with “shell shock.” But “PTSD” — not just as a symptom profile, but also as a name for that symptom profile, and a set of social connotations around that name — clearly fits.
In some ways it's a natural consequence of broadening the scope of something. Is the loss of impact because of the language, or because it now applies to a lot more situations which we imagine is expressed in different ways (whether that's largely true or not)?
Shell shock likely didn't conjure the idea of a person going through a harrowing experience as much as a soldier going through constant shelling for weeks. The first encompasses the other, but the second one is much more explicit and conjures specific thoughts that we can latch on to when we try to imagine the experience.
Battle fatigue also paints a somewhat specific picture, even if more broad than shell shock. We can imagine what types of things caused this, even if our imagination probably only covered a subset of the actual causes. Those things it does conjure are bad though, so the idea is very impactful.
PTSD, which more accurately encompasses a lot more situations, not all of them (or maybe even the majority of them) related to war, also leaves us without as much information to use to form an emotional response to as we imagine what it was they went through. Was it the horrors of war? Was it assault by a stranger as a civilian? Was it physical abuse by someone you know? Was it long term mental abuse? We know it was bad, to affect the sufferer, but it's harder to form a real emotional response, I think, when the cause is ambiguous.
So, is the problem the language, or is the language just a side-effect of the increased scope of the term, and the problem is actually the increased scope?
I’ve always thought that this was a bad example of the euphemism treadmill, because each step is clearly an attempt to be more general than the last. The name makes it clear that this isn’t just a disorder you’ll find in soldiers at constant fear of being shelled at any moment (shell shock); nor even of soldiers who’ve seen the horrors of battle generally (battle fatigue); but rather that anyone who has been through any kind of chronic, fearful stress under the constant expectation that some traumatizing event might happen at any moment, is liable to end up experiencing these symptoms.
Or, to put it more viscerally: doctors would be wary of diagnosing a victim of domestic abuse with “shell shock.” But “PTSD” — not just as a symptom profile, but also as a name for that symptom profile, and a set of social connotations around that name — clearly fits.
> CSAM
This is actually an example of a completely different effect: it’s a cultural shibboleth. Police want to use automatic word filters to discover and surface conversations between pedophiles, while not triggering those filters with their own conversations about the pedophiles’ activities. So they have invented a word that is equivalent to the generic term in meaning, but part of “policing language.” (And, as a special trick, it’s a term with no potential for a treadmill effect, as pedophiles would be loath to use a term that frames them as perpetrators of abuse.)