J. TODD FOSTER: Beware of the Cloven-Hooved-Animals-With-Curly-Tails Flu

Seventeen years ago, I and two newspaper partners in Spokane, Wash., embarked upon a six-month investigation of the U.S. Forest Service. The resulting series chronicled how the federal agency laid waste to public lands in the Pacific Northwest through indiscriminate timber harvesting with no accountability.

Clear-cuts.

That’s what you call it when you leave forestlands looking like mange on a dog’s back. And that “mange” phrase was how we described it in what turned out to be an award-winning series dubbed “Our Failing Forests.” We – and I give huge nods to partners Jim Lynch, now an award-winning novelist, and then longtime Forest Service beat writer Julie Titone – had plenty of evidence: Our investigation included admissions by Forest Service personnel and our own personal public lands fly-overs in chartered Cessnas.

The universal term for knocking down trees wholesale was and is “clear-cut,” but about this same time, the Forest Service issued a memorandum to employees declaring that hence forward, when trees were mowed down over defined areas, it would constitute a “temporary meadow.”

The term “clear-cut” would become “temporary meadow.”

Forgive my nausea.

Which brings me to the latest euphemism sweeping America. The Associated Press released a story Thursday that began:

GENEVA – The World Health Organization said confirmed swine flu cases rose to 257 worldwide Thursday and announced it would stop using the term “swine flu” to avoid confusion over the danger posed by pigs.

“Rather than calling this swine flu ... we’re going to stick with the technical scientific name H1N1 influenza A,” he said.

H1N1.

That’s what we’re all supposed to call the swine flu now. Aside from the fact that no respectable agency would go by the acronym WHO, we’re supposed to protect the “image” of an albeit lovable animal, but one that roots in its own feces and is happy about it. And, we’re supposed to protect pigs from wholesale slaughter by Muslim-dominated countries that, in the words of hitman Jules Winnfield from the movie “Pulp Fiction,” “just don’t dig on swine.”

I might have been willing to go along with the PC Police on this but, to borrow another Jules line: “Well we’d have to be talkin’ about one charming [expletive deleted] pig. I mean he’d have to be 10 times more charmin’ than that Arnold on Green Acres, you know what I’m sayin’?”

The absurdity of renaming the swine flu hit home on Thursday afternoon during an editors’ meeting here to decide which stories belonged on the front page. Those meetings are held every day at newspapers worldwide and are called budget meetings. Not budget as in money, but budget as in stories – local, state, national and international.

Copy desk supervisor Jerry Shell, a longtime BHC editor whose sense of humor is palpable but arid, presented the national AP stories in hard-copy form, as he always does; the portion on swine flu, however, was headlined “Cloven-hooved-animals-with-curly-tails flu budget.”

When I reminded Jerry that H1N1 was now the vogue term, he responded with references to “R2-D2” and “C-3PO.”

Editors just don’t dig on euphemisms. Neither do the American people. And that should be a lesson to the Obama administration, which recently changed the term “Global War on Terror” to “Overseas Contingency Operation.”

To quote the late George Carlin: “The more syllables a euphemism has, the further divorced from reality it is.”

H1N1 equals four syllables. Swine flu equals two. Yet we live in a society where “prostitutes” have become known in some circles as “commercial sex workers.”

Why can’t we just call a spade a spade?

I’m with Carlin on this. He argued during his stand-up routines that as government complicates serious concepts, including medical conditions, the sufferers are taken less serious. For example, World War I’s “shell shock” became WW2’s “battle fatigue.” In the Korean War, it was “operational exhaustion,” and in Vietnam it was “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

The 1918 swine flu pandemic killed at least 20 million people worldwide and up to 100 million. It affected a third of the world’s population. It was the H1N1 strain. It appears to be back. Let’s not sugarcoat it with euphemisms or feed at the trough of political correctness. Let’s deal with it.

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at jfoster@bristolnews.com or (276) 645-2513. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jtoddbhc.