Likely Normal

Humanity has a remarkable talent for solving problems by simply slapping a new label on them. It’s like playing linguistic Tetris—when a term becomes too uncomfortable, we just rotate it until it fits a nicer narrative. “Illegal aliens” becomes “undocumented workers” because the first one states a legal fact, while the second sounds like someone who just misplaced their passport. Never mind that crossing a border without permission is, by definition, illegal—we’d rather debate semantics than the actual issue.

This isn’t just an immigration thing. We do this everywhere:

• “Tax increases” become “revenue enhancements” because nobody likes taxes, but who doesn’t love enhancements?
• “Firing people” turns into “rightsizing” or “letting go”—as if the employee just floated away on a gentle breeze rather than being marched out by security.
• “War” gets rebranded as “conflict” or “special military operation” because one sounds like a geopolitical disaster, and the other sounds like a training exercise gone slightly off-schedule.

The magic trick here is simple: If we change the label, we can pretend the contents of the box changed too. A “garbage collector” becomes a “sanitation engineer”—same job, but now it sounds like they have a PhD in trash. A “used car” becomes a “pre-owned vehicle” because used implies wear and tear, while pre-owned suggests it was merely… appreciated by a previous connoisseur.

Of course, this doesn’t actually solve anything—it just moves the argument to a new box with prettier wrapping. Call it “undocumented” instead of “illegal,” and suddenly we’re not debating lawbreaking, we’re debating terminology. Which, conveniently, means we never have to agree on what to actually do about it.

In the end, we’re all just playing a giant game of “Pin the Euphemism on the Problem.” The more syllables we add, the less we have to confront reality. So the next time you hear a politically corrected, rebranded, focus-group-approved term, just remember: The box might be new, but whatever’s inside is still the same messy, complicated thing we didn’t want to deal with in the first place.