Harger: George Carlin warned us about soft language. Seattle and King County gave him 40 years of new material.
Mar 30, 2026, 5:00 AM | Updated: 12:11 pm
George Carlin had a bit about language. About how Americans keep inventing softer and softer words to avoid dealing with hard realities. He traced how “shell shock” became “battle fatigue,” then “operational exhaustion,” then “post-traumatic stress disorder.” Same condition. Each generation found a way to drain the humanity out of it, bury the pain under more syllables, more distance, more jargon.
He called it soft language. Language that takes the life out of life.
Carlin was doing this bit in 1990. He had no idea how good it was going to get.
Washington state ranks third-worst in the nation for property crime. We have some of the most carefully worded language guides, reentry initiatives, and euphemism style sheets of any government in America. Make of that what you will.
In Boston, they call it robbery. In Seattle, King County Public Health calls the perpetrator a “justice-impacted individual.”
Let me give you a hypothetical. A woman is walking to her car in a parking garage in Seattle. A man grabs her purse, shoves her to the ground, and runs. She breaks her wrist in the fall. She’s shaken for months. She stops going out at night.
In New York, that’s a robbery. In Boston, that’s an assault. In Chicago, the guy who did it is a criminal. Direct. Clear. Subject, verb, object. He did this to her.
In Seattle, according to King County Public Health’s official language guide, the man who did this is a “justice-impacted individual.” What he did created certain outcomes. The system became involved. Things occurred.
Notice what happened there. The woman who broke her wrist disappeared. The man who shoved her became a passive object, impacted by justice, rather than someone who chose to attack another person. The language didn’t just soften the crime. It erased the criminal act entirely.
King County Public Health instructs employees not to say criminal, convict, inmate, felon, or offender. These words, the guide explains, “can feel derogatory, stigmatizing, and dehumanizing.” Instead: “person in custody.” “Detained person.” “Justice-impacted individual.”
Carlin nailed it. Toilet paper became bathroom tissue. Car crashes became automobile accidents. And criminals became justice-impacted individuals. Nobody asked us. It just happened.
The millionaire’s tax, the income tax Washington Democrats refused to name
This is not just about criminal justice. It’s a governing philosophy around here.
During the recent legislative session in Olympia, Democratic lawmakers pushed hard for what they kept calling the “millionaire’s tax.” Every press conference. Every floor speech. The millionaire’s tax.
I kept calling it an income tax. Because that’s what it is. An income tax with a deduction of the first million dollars of income. It is, by definition, an income tax. But the people pushing it were absolutely determined never to say those two words together. Because “income tax” tells you exactly what it is. “millionaire’s tax” tells you what they want you to feel about it.
Carlin again: the dump became the landfill. Used cars became previously owned transportation. An income tax became the millionaire’s tax. Same thing. New words. Designed to manage your reaction before you’ve had a chance to form one.
The Aurora Avenue pimp Seattle’s language guide wants you to describe differently
Leon Henderson ran fentanyl and women on Aurora Avenue for years. He was arrested three times in nine months with thousands of pills, loaded guns, and female companions, one of whom had been reported missing. A prior conviction for forcing a woman into sex work by injecting her with heroin and threatening her with death.
In Baltimore, he’s a pimp and a drug dealer. In Philadelphia, he’s a predator. In Seattle, under the King County Public Health language guide, he is “a person whose substance use disorder and involvement with the criminal legal system created barriers to housing stability and economic mobility.”
I am not making that up. That is the logical endpoint of the language they are asking us to use.
The women he controlled don’t get a language guide. The addicts he sold fentanyl to on Aurora, the ones folded over on the sidewalk, the ones found unresponsive in tents. They don’t get a workgroup or an executive order. They get to be “persons with substance use disorder” too. Everyone’s a victim of something. Nobody did anything to anybody.
One thing before anyone misreads this. Race, sexual orientation, a developmental disability: nobody chooses those. The work to strip cruelty out of how we talk about people for things they were born with was worth doing, and I’m not here to relitigate it. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about a guy who made a decision. Then another one. Then packed a backpack full of fentanyl and headed to Aurora Avenue. Last I checked, that’s not something you’re born with. Your race doesn’t hurt anyone. Robbing someone does. Not the same conversation.
Reentry 2030, Washington’s soft language approach to crime, and a property crime rate that keeps climbing
On his way out the door in 2024, Governor Inslee signed an executive order directing all state agencies to use “human-centered and person-first language that destigmatizes formerly incarcerated individuals.” The Department of Corrections has a program called Reentry 2030 promising “successful reintegration for every person” and vowing to “revolutionize the future of reentry programs.”
The Seattle Office of Civil Rights spent considerable energy debating whether even the word “reentry” is acceptable, since it implies the person “belonged” somewhere before going to prison.
Again, Washington ranks third worst in the nation for property crime.
I’ll just let that sit there for a second.
Some people should feel bad about what they did. Shame, used honestly, is one of the most powerful motivators not to do something again. When we hand someone a language guide that removes all judgment from their actions, when we tell them in the most polished bureaucratic terms that what they did was really just a series of circumstances that occurred, we are not helping them. We are removing the one internal mechanism that might actually produce change.
The man who shoved that woman to the ground and broke her wrist made a choice. He should own it. The language that surrounds him right now is specifically designed to make sure he doesn’t have to.
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Two syllables versus six
Convict. Two syllables. Honest, direct.
Justice-impacted individual. Ten syllables. And the pain is buried completely under language so careful, so considered, so thoroughly drained of judgment that you almost forget someone got hurt.
Carlin said if we’d still been calling it shell shock, some Vietnam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. Clear language forces a clear response. Soft language lets everyone off the hook. Including the people doing the harm.
Carlin saw all of this coming in 1990. He’d take one look at King County Public Health’s style guide, the Reentry 2030 Washington initiative, the millionaire’s tax, income tax, and the Seattle Reentry Workgroup’s concerns about whether “reentry” implies too much belonging, and he’d say: see, I told you. It just keeps getting worse.
He was right. And we’re the ones paying for it.
Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here.
