I Was Thinking... Simply Said

Growing up in the 1950s and 60s, many of the statements and descriptions I heard probably would be considered inappropriate by today’s standards.  Most of my relatives had a high school education or less and were plain spoken people. They called a spade a spade. I never knew what kind of spade they were referring to, but it meant you called it like you saw it without sugar coating anything.
If someone wasn’t very intelligence he may be labeled as dumb as a rock.  But in today’s more sensitive society with an emphasis on political correctness, much of the simple speech imagery has been replaced with kinder and gentler terminology.
No one is dumb anymore; they are just intellectually challenged. Some are so challenged you wonder who dressed them in the morning. That same person may be broke, but today we might have to say they just suffered an economic downturn. If that downturn continued long enough, they would end up as an outside urban dweller, or what used to be called homeless.
My dad would have had a tough time adapting to our current politically correct vocabulary. His favorite description of someone quite overweight was, “they sure were corn fed.” That made perfect sense to a farmer that raised beef cattle. I can’t see my dad saying a fat person was “a metabolic overachiever.” He probably never called a short person vertically challenged either. 
I am also sure he never referred to our manure spreader as a “natural fertilizer distribution device.”  He didn’t call that same stinky job as “nasally disturbing” either.  Fancy descriptions for simple things never occurred to him.
While politically correct terms are meant to protect people’s feelings or to make them feel better about themselves, sometimes they just aren’t reality. Is your self-esteem really improved if you call yourself a sanitation engineer instead of a garbage collector or an administrative assistant instead of a secretary? 
Is an intelligence improvement facilitator more prestigious than being a teacher? Would you rather be called a domestic engineer instead of a stay-at-home mom? Is a maintenance engineer better than a janitor? 
However, some political correctness is just a method to mask reality or hide what essentially is really happening. Today if you are unemployed you may want to say you are currently economically inactive. Instead of saying you got caught shoplifting, you could say you were involved with irregular merchandise procurement.
You weren’t really robbing a store, you just had some unauthorized resource distribution. And currency re-creation sounds a lot better than counterfeiting. But it does sound better to be a visually unfavorable, intellectually impaired, and chemically inconvenienced person than an ugly stupid drunk.  
Businesses have found that vague terminology is an excellent way to make things sound better than they are. A company that experiences negative cash-flow is losing money. If they are on the verge of collapse, they might be encountering some non-traditional success or sub-optional results. As a worker, you also need to understand some of the business double speak.
If your company hires an efficiency expert, they are trying to figure out who to fire. When a company decides to “right size, restructure, or de-staff,” it means someone is going to lose their job. A negative advancement sounds better than a demotion and putting you on indefinite idle is more pleasing than saying you’re fired. Also, anyone who was considered for vocational re-location or allowed to explore other opportunities was still without a job.
As a teacher for many years, you also developed educational talk for discussing student problems with parents. A student that spaced out in class was “attentionally challenged.” Some kid who was extremely social meant they talked too much. If someone was a motivationally underachiever, they used to be called lazy. If a student was on the verge of failing your class, you let the parents know they might be academically challenged.
Telling a parent their child suffered from task incompletion was just another way of saying they didn’t turn in their homework. But no matter how you phrased it, most parents got the drift that Johnny wasn’t going to be a rocket scientist.
Did You Ever Wonder? -   If you’re trying to fail and you succeed, was it a success or failure?