Death Euphemism like V.S.A. and "passing" at Bill Casselman's Canadian Word of the Day

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BAFFLEGAB & GOBBLEDYGOOK

During the week of February 18 to Feb 24, 2007, both Toronto firefighters and Toronto policemen spoke, in radio and TV reports, of victims being found at the scene of fires and crimes “V.S.A.” Vital Signs Absent. Winnipeg and Vancouver public safety workers use the 40-year-old acronym regularly. Why is there such dread about using the ‘d’ word? Because the victim might be revived? No. These people may be employing a linguistic ploy. It’s called gobbledygook or weasel words.

What is gobbledygook?

Gobbledygook is language used to deceive, not to communicate. A medical services coordinator for a fire department in Canada reported that emergency personnel had found a victim “in a non-viable condition. He had no pulse and was not breathing.” Well now, Mr. Coordinator. Can I call you Lem? That’d be what? Dang near ready fer a white nightie and little wings? Leastways, tuggin’ at the Grim Reaper’s hem, eh? I mean, you get a citizen up there in the higher realms of non-viability, you’re saying: the buzzards are circling, right? I think what you’re suggesting, Lem, is: this dude was rapidly approaching non-dudedom. Bone-yardwise, ready to be planted. Would I be close? Lem, seriously now and all kidding towards one side, could this guy be dead ?

Gobbledygook is language spoken or written to evade responsibility, not to answer a question but to defuse it by coating the answer in a glutinous syrup of verbal glop. Acid rain in Canada becomes “atmospheric deposition of anthropogenetically-derived acidic substances.” Such language means to suffocate stark fact in a muffling blanket of mumbo-jumbo.

Any cogent reason to use V.S.A.?

Who is legally empowered to pronounce death? A coroner, a surgeon, a doctor? Yes. Perhaps a nurse? Probably not if doctors have any influence on the law. And they do. In most cases we want a trained professional to utter a decision about death. Ambulance attendants are fond of euphemism, telling us they don’t like to use a word as final as dead, because people are revived and there may arise subsequent legal questions. But just how often are persons brought back to life nowadays? What about the vast majority of, for example, traffic accident fatalities?

Toronto, Canada Highway Dialogue

Scene: Queen Elizabeth Highway in Toronto. An SUV has smashed into a mini-compact. Both vehicles are spritzed with oozing gore and sundry body parts.

Bystander at traffic accident: Is that driver dead?

Ambulance attendant: I couldn’t say.

Bystander: Well, his head is here at the QEW and Islington and his body is thousands of feet away. Would that not permit us to assume that he may be dead?

Ambulance attendant: I think the word dead might be a trifle extreme. I can tell you this: with his head and his body sixteen blocks apart, I can certainly state, with the utmost confidence, that he is not feeling his best.

Is such euphemistic claptrap funny? Yes. We laugh because it’s such a bare-faced, bloody cover-up to say the guy is not dead. We know it’s a phoney-baloney use of English. Such fibbing is sad too. Every time you tell a deliberate lie using English, English is diminished. The power of language to approach truth loses some of its honing potency. Now, of course, speakers dilute language’s clarity every day on purpose. Lying is human nature. But when you nod your head like a stupid goose every time someone says ‘non-viable’ or ‘no vital signs’ instead of saying dead, you are promoting perpetual linguistic evasion.

Deliberate gobbledygook ought to remain the despised habit of government hacks and other elected shirkers and liars, of entrepreneurial poltroons and advertising-agency slimeballs (persons who tell lies for a living). Honest citizens must shun the oily euphemism.

The Passing of Lloyd

I seldom comment on new uses of older words, because a living language changes and linguistic change is a sign of language viability (to employ viability in an honest usage). It’s silly and hypocritical to rant against every new word or linguistic change, like some slobbering TV evangelist enumerating everyone else’s sins while he makes a note to book a motel room for the ewe and himself after the broadcast.

But there is one death euphemism that does get my sheep…er…goat.

One used to say: Lloyd passed away last Saturday.

Now, in obituary notices, on funeral-home memorial cards and in the mouths of surviving relatives, one encounters: “Lloyd passed.”

People who use it consider it more elegant than ‘passed away’ and not so stark as ‘Lloyd died.’

I find it a vulgar, euphemistic evasion of the fact of Lloyd’s death.

I never read or hear its loathsome use without being jolted to unpleasant or satiric thoughts.

Lloyd passed.

What did Lloyd pass? A kidney stone? An anus-sundering fecal bolus? The corner store? His exam at night school for his course in Learn-Bomb-Disposal-While-You Sleep? A coprolith immediately seized by a medical museum?

Lloyd did not pass anything. Lloyd died. Just say it and begin slowly, painfully, to accept it. To cushion the jolt of death with denial only prolongs the grief, until, spun out to unhealthy psychological amplitude, one’s grieving festers and sickens and rots the daily equanimity needed to get through and to resolve the other problems that life will most surely pour upon you.

V.S.A. Not Necessarily Euphemistic in Intent

Thursday March 1, 2007

The first time I encountered that phrase [”Vital Signs Absent”] was in the 1970’s when I was involved in work on the Ontario Ambulance Information System.

Under the regulations as they then stood, an ambulance attendant could treat someone as dead only if the subject had been ‘decapitated or bisected’ or had ‘visible signs of decomposition’; otherwise they had to take the body to an ER rather than a funeral home (not many places in Ontario had an actual morgue).

I was told about one meeting at which the meaning of ‘bisected’ was discussed in depth in order to determine how equal the resulting sections had to be in the case of bisection.

I think we adopt some of these peculiar linguistic forms, not as euphemisms intended to conceal, but as attempts at clarity and precision in the presence of consequences (e.g. liability for doing the wrong thing), when the correspondingly precise description without a ‘canonical’ term like “VSA” would simply be too long to use. Of course, these terms interact with other terms to produce unexpected understandings and usages.

Keith Thomas, Toronto

In my latest book, Canadian Words & Sayings there is a 20-page chapter, one of my funniest, on Canadian bafflegab and egregious Canuck euphemism. Order it online below.

Origin of the Word GOBBLEDYGOOK

No surprise is it to learn that this term sprang to the lips of a man who had to listen to politicians blabbing. During World War II, Congressman Maury Maverick of Texas made the word up one day in Washington, D.C., after listening to more verbal bamboozlement than he could abide.

In May of 1944 Maverick told the New York Times magazine: “Perhaps I was thinking of the old bearded turkey gobbler back in Texas who was always gobbledygobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity. At the end of this gobble there was a sort of gook.” The new word was so echoic and fitting that it passed immediately into popular speech.

The congressman has an interesting last name. Could it be the origin of the word “maverick” to name anyone unorthodox and not part of a group? Yes, the congressman’s grandfather was Samuel E. Maverick (1803-1870) who was a Texas rancher and state politician who refused for certain practical reasons to ever brand his stock, vast herds of longhorn cattle. He then playfully claimed that all unbranded range stock might belong to him, following an agricultural precedent of pioneer America that unbranded animals on the open range, not rustled and unclaimed, belonged to whoever first branded them. Texas ranchers took to calling any unbranded cattle who wandered from a herd “mavericks.” Then use in Texas politics followed, and a maverick became any politician who would not follow his party’s policy line.