Written by Al Rodbell   

'Did you know that Bruce Dern slept with Eleanor Roosevelt'

That's what the guy at the tennis courts said today while we were talking about the new film he stared in, "Nebraska."  I've been playing with Arty for many years and he often brings up a range of subjects that he would enjoy talking about, sometimes to the point of having to remind him that we were here to play tennis not to have a seminar.  He invariably had done some thinking on these subjects, so when he said this about the actor Bruce Dern,  a film star who many people admire, we couldn't just dismiss it.  One woman challenged him, bringing up the difference in their age; and Arty replied, "Yes, he was much younger, which makes it even more surprising, and also shocking.  He said that Dern recently talked about the incident, even going into details of her uncovered legs next to him lying in bed they shared.


This was "Eleanor Roosevelt," probably the closest this country has to a secular saint.  She was the heart of her husbands Presidency, the one who would arrange for Marian Anderson to sing at the D.C. mall after the Daughters of the American Revolution had rebuffed her because of her race.  It was she who got a hearing by the President with American Rabbis whose people were facing annihilation during the war.  In her later years she was a key figure in creating the United Nations and then being America's first Ambassador to this body.  We know about the abuse that she took from political enemies and her difficult marriage that she endured with quiet dignity.  


Since Arty mentioned that Dern's disclosure was on Wikipedia,  I immediately researched it when I got home and, sure enough, here's the link and the entire ugly disrespectful story of this shameful incident that Dern divulged on the Tavis Smiley program on PBS:


Dern responding:
Yeah, right. Then (My Father) he went on to become Roosevelt’s first secretary of war, in the first Cabinet, and he died while he was in office. My family used to go visit the Roosevelts up at Hyde Park, where they were outside of New York.

One year they were visiting and little Brucie got to
go with them, and I was riding a bicycle in the afternoon, and ran into a tree and hit my head and had a concussion.

In those days when you had a concussion they laid you down with your head on a pillow and then strapped your head across the pillow so you couldn’t move it to the side or forward or anything.

When I kind of came to, I guess it was late at night, 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, and as I rolled my head to the side, I saw this lady’s legs. They were kind of veiny, and had a nightgown down to about here with little kind of tacky slippers.
(Laughter)

I didn’t understand. As I slowly came up and started
looking up to where the woman’s face was, she had a book in her lap, and she looked like this (makes face) and had that Roosevelt bite. I
realized, my God, it’s the president’s wife. (Laughter)

O.K, the Arty from the tennis court I described is me,  Al the blogger, who told everyone in feigned seriousness about Bruce and Eleanor, accentuating and always using the exact wording that they had "Slept Together." with everyone taking it for the euphemism for  "having sex" which is a euphemism for something more explicit   The reason that I wrote this was not for the silly joke, but to illustrate something that I take quite seriously,  how the expansion of euphemisms, unlike in this example, can actually degrade our society in more ways than we know.


Those reading this will always know when "sleep with" is the euphemism or when it can mean what Dern described from the context.  So, I tricked those on the courts by my expression and tone of voice.  Yet, in decades to come, for example if there is a document about crowded tenements where the term is used not only for a married couple to define their sexual intimacy, but for other situations, such as guests who could often outnumber beds, there will be ambiguity.


Sexuality has long been a taboo subject that required euphemisms to protect the kiddies and to identify one as being cultured.  I'm told that the word "pregnant" had been expressed as "with child" even though the latter term could describe having a living post fetus one as well.  We got over that taboo, but we seem to have developed many more without any real push-back.  Now, the motive is not to protect children from learning too soon about their species' carnal nature, but to protect anyone who could be insulted by a description that defines them in an unflattering way.  


Enforcement of this degradation of language is usually informal, but in a recent case it was by federal legislation.  Mental retardation is a congenital condition that like deafness or intersex genetalia creates challenges for the child and family.  Congress went so far as to mandate that all federal documents elide the term "mental retardation" and replace it with "intellectual disability."  This represents the trend in linguistic obfuscation which is replacing precise words with those that are less specific.  One can become intellectually disabled by trauma at any age, or by extreme social deprivation.  Thus use of a specific term for a congenital condition is actually made illegal in some legal contexts.  (this objection is mentioned in this official document, but they ultimately ignored it)  I ask the reader to consider whether this increases or decreases the pain of those so afflicted.


Unfortunately, this movement has been incorporated into a commonly used term with all of the defects of linguistic imprecision that this essay is condemning, "Political Correctness."   The phrase, with it's own abbreviation, "PC" turns this into a partisan issue by depicting it as a liberal quirk, or just another aspect of our world that is as inevitable as power breeding corruption. 


This "Linguistic Degradation" or "LD" for short,is predicated on the absurd conceit that by eliminating words that describe difficult problems we make them go away.  I explored this in