John McWhorter is the furthest thing from the language police as you can get among the commentariat. He is an astute analyst who means what he says and thinks of language as a way to understand culture rather than seek to control it. Per McWhorter in a January Atlantic essay, “Among the many reasons we [linguists] view language so impartially is because attempts to deter people from speaking in ways they find natural essentially never work except superficially.”
This is why it was surprising to find him missing something in that very essay entitled, “Troops Is an Unethical Euphemism,” which he’s done such good work over the years pointing out. The places we find ourselves thinking of word choices as ethical matters tend to be places where, to quote McWhorter writing in 2015, we are demonstrating an “obsessive piety.” In this case, he’s let a cultural unease about our use of the U.S. military and the treatment of members of the military, and the chasmic cultural distance between the military and civilians, insert itself as a moralizing view of how we should use military words.
McWhorter says his problem with “troop” is that it is “distancing” and dehumanizing, writing that “’troops’ makes living, breathing individuals working for all of us under often grievously dangerous conditions sound like some kind of substance, like Jell-O, or some kind of freight.” And “parents do not kiss their troop goodbye. The person learning to use a prosthetic leg is not a troop, nor was she one while serving in the conflict that saddled her with such a tragic burden. The contents of a body bag are not a troop. I propose we use the words soldier, sailor, or Marine when describing members of the armed forces. A soldier is a person; a troop is something from the game of Risk.”
McWhorter is hardly the only example of this tendency beginning to show up. Task and Purpose reports on Marine veteran Patch Baker, who is petitioning to get newsrooms to formalize a style guide norm requiring capitalizing the word “veteran.” “Veterans have given so much, the least we could do is give them a capital V,” the petition reads. It’s actually less than the least we could do, being as morally irrelevant as it is grammatically ill-conceived. But it is a function of the same impulse to get our relationship with military personnel right as a society by messing with words. It’s always worth noting where we are inserting the ethical into the lexical, because as McWhorter points out, “Taboos are about what we fear.”
As with God stuff, sex stuff, slur stuff, and the like, war stuff sends us moralizing. So we make the terms around it sacred and profane, creating rules about what constitutes the proper or improper ways to use them. And we resort to prefab cliches. “Men and women in uniform” is a lot more euphemistic than “troop” is. And we like to have “thank you for your service” to hand for the same reason we lean on “I’m sorry for your loss” or “thoughts and prayers” at funerals: We don’t quite know what other words to say.
