More on Euphemism-The Victory of Appearance over Reality

A shallow view of the use of euphemism holds that it is the result of the desire to make what is ordinary and sometimes even trivial look important. So garbage men are called sanitation workers even though there's nothing sanitary about what they do, including the sanitary land fill. Policemen are called law enforcement officers even though they have nothing to do until the law is broken. They certainly don't force people to obey the law; they attempt to arrest people who have already broken it. And, to mention only a few, there are the euphemisms used in the business community, perhaps the most egregious of which is the Department of Human Resources.

What would you say about a company that purchased its workers computers that were to be used only for word processing, and then, when the need arose for spread-sheeting, went out and purchased still another computer for each of its workers to be used only for the creation of spreadsheets, and then, again, when the need arose for graphics, went out and purchased still another computer for each of its employees to be used only for the creation of graphics. Pretty stupid, huh? But that is exactly what companies do with their employees.

Human beings, of course, were multitasking long before any machine was invented. Every human being is a multifaceted being; each has numerous interests and talents; no human being is a single purpose machine. But when an employee joins a company, he is human resourced into a job description, a pigeon hole, and that's the extent of what the Department of Human Resources knows about him/her. The employee is not looked upon as a resource; s/he's looked upon as a tool.

When personnel departments morphed into departments of human resources, nothing changed but the name. So a mere record-keeping function was made to look like something more. Yet it was still merely a record-keeping department.

What results from this failure of corporate departments of human resources to know what resources are available?

Well, if a company has a problem it needs expertise on, it can't ask its human resources department if anyone already employed has that expertise, because the human resources department doesn't know. There is no pigeon hole for that tool. So companies are forced to bring in outsiders, sometimes at enormous costs, to provide the needed expertise that the company already has. What's worse, sometimes the outside expert doesn't know as much about the matter as some overlooked employee already within the company.

So this failure on the part of departments of human resources to really know what resources are available forces companies to act just like the imaginary company that buys each employee a different computer for each different task the employee performs. And this practice is just as idiotic when dealing with human beings as it is when dealing with computers. (8/20/2005)

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