Time & Perspective Quote by Joseph Wood Krutch

Euphemisms aren’t polite little masks for reality; they’re perishable goods. Krutch’s point lands with the calm certainty of someone who has watched language try - and fail - to launder uncomfortable truths. A euphemism works only while it still carries plausible deniability, while listeners can pretend they don’t hear the blunt thing underneath. Time, repetition, and shared experience erode that buffer. The phrase becomes contaminated by the very reality it was designed to soften, and the “nice” word starts to feel as ugly as the original.

Calling it “a losing game” is the tell: Krutch isn’t marveling at semantic drift so much as diagnosing a cultural reflex. We don’t reach for euphemism because it clarifies; we reach for it because it delays consequence. Institutions, especially, use softened language to manage outrage and preserve legitimacy. Environmentalism supplies an obvious backdrop: “resource extraction” instead of destruction, “development” instead of displacement, “management” instead of domination. The public eventually learns to hear the damage anyway, and the euphemism begins to reek of the cover-up.

The bite in the last clause - “but we keep on trying” - turns the observation into an indictment. It suggests a kind of moral laziness: rather than change our behavior, we rename it. Krutch is warning that language can’t save us from reality; it can only postpone the reckoning, and often makes the reckoning worse by training us to tolerate what we should confront.