Connect: 'We're concerned that some of our guests don't feel comfortable in what really is a family environment," Helen Smith, property manager at Bluewater shopping centre in Kent, England, told the BBC.
"Guests"? Smith called customers "guests" a fortnight ago when Bluewater decided to ban teenagers wearing hoodies and baseball caps and to outlaw swearing.
There are cases for and against the ban on hoodies, but there is absolutely no excuse for calling customers "guests". The word is as deliberately obfuscating and designed to conceal as any hoodie. Calling customers, from whom shop-owners want money, cash, loot, lucre, dough, spondulix - call it what you will - "guests" is a form of PR swearing. It's designed to distort the truth.
What makes not calling customers "customers" particularly ugly is that other people - students and welfare recipients, for instance - are frequently and inappropriately called "customers" by the institutions with which they deal. The intention in such guff is to avoid calling a spade a spade. Are people fooled? Who knows? But it's not only distorting - it's dangerous. When power seeks to mangle language in such Orwellian ways, you can be sure the mangling is for its benefit. Echoing Smith, Supt Martin Hewitt of North Kent police force spoke about maintaining "the quality of experience for guests". Thus cop-speak is endorsing the nonsense even though Bluewater is a shopping centre and shopping customarily produces customers.
Inappropriate language seems to have become particularly widespread of late. A letter to this newspaper this week from Tom Cooney of UCD's law faculty, about the boycott of Israeli universities by Britain's Association of University Teachers (AUT), concluded: "The last time academics boycotted Jews was in Germany in [ the] 1930s and 1940s. I fear that the sound of the hob-nailed hate behind this boycott is the sound of Kristallnacht in academia." Oh dear! I fear that the sound of this hob-nailed language is the sound of propaganda in academia. It really is as ugly, distorting and dangerous as Smith's "guests". Again, like the row over hoodies, there are cases to be made for and against the boycott. There is, however, no excuse for Tom Cooney's language.
At Kristallnacht, which in 1938 effectively started the Holocaust, Jews were an appallingly abused group. They were murdered, dispossessed and abased daily. To parallel the Jews of Europe under Nazi rule to this boycott is arguably to abuse and debase the memory of the Holocaust. It is also - and with obscene irony - to engage in ugly rhetoric.
Everybody, including many Israelis, knows the Palestinians are the more murdered, dispossessed and abased group in the ongoing conflict. That cannot justify Palestinian outrages against Jewish civilians, but that's the truth of it. Quite simply, the Palestinians, though suffering on nothing like the same scale or intensity as Jews under Nazi rule, are in the less powerful position.
Cooney is free to make up his mind on the rightness or wrongness of an academic boycott of Israeli universities. He terms the AUT's decision "racist" but defenders of the boycott term Israel's policies "racist" and "colonial". They point out that more than 650 Palestinian children have been killed in the occupied territories since September 2000.
Furthermore, they argue that apartheid South Africa was similarly boycotted to telling effect. Tom Cooney counters that "Israel is not apartheid South Africa". And so it goes - there are cases to be made either way. Perhaps none is stronger, however, than that made by the Israeli academics Ilan Pappe and Tanya Reinhart who urge support for Palestinian academics calling for a boycott.
Anyway, it's the "Kristallnacht" reference that seems cheap and inappropriate. It's as overstated as Smith's "guests" was understated. Both seem disproportionate and self-serving. Therein is their danger. Repeated often enough - especially by such official sources as police and lawyers - they misshape the world and minds within it. Josef Goebbels would have known as much.
The problem is we can expect more of the ugly rhetoric because this society is coarsening. The humanities are being downgraded in Irish higher education in order to suit the economy. As in the hoodies debate and the Middle East conflict there are cases to be made for and against the current trend. But that's the truth of what's happening in the universities.
The Government has decided to cash in elements of civilisation because it judges - probably correctly - there's votes in it. It suits the politicians, for instance, to keep Gerry Wrixon as president of University College Cork. He sees his role as being that of a chief executive of a major industry in education (or, more likely, the "education sector"). His business approach helps prop them up and they reciprocate.
Minister for Finance Brian Cowen and Minister for Education Mary Hanafin know that in extending Wrixon's term beyond retirement age he'll perform for them and him. Yet in all this the trio seems shameless. Wrixon refuses to recognise he's had his go and it's now time to step aside. No fear of that. Oh no! Like abusing the words "guests" and "Kristallnacht" there is absolutely no excuse for extending Gerry Wrixon's presidency.