On the Abuse of Language: Three Small Examples

Language is too often abused in casual conversation, but even more so in the media, where precision ought to be observed with particular care. Former colleagues knew me to be exacting about language in drafts crossing my desk. Those drafts would return marked not for style, but for word choice. Words are not as interchangeable as many assume. They carry moral weight, legal consequence, and cultural implication that may not be immediately apparent. To treat them as fungible is to dull thought itself.

While reading a recent essay in The Economist (“Schumpeter’s Bonfire of the Elites: Jeffrey Epstein’s Ghost Will Not Be Easily Silenced”), that old habit of scrutiny reasserted itself. The impulse to edit was difficult to suppress. Three passages, in particular, illustrate how subtle imprecision can distort moral reality.

I. “Young Women”

The essay opens:

“When he was alive, Jeffrey Epstein relentlessly abused young women.”

Epstein’s first conviction arose from soliciting sex from a fourteen-year-old girl. The investigation that followed involved multiple minors, many of them high school students. The public record is clear: these were children.

To describe such victims as “young women” is misleading. It shifts the moral register. “Young women” suggests agency, maturity, even consent in the reader’s imagination. “Girls,” or “children,” would not. When minors are involved, euphemism functions as diminishment.

Language can wound twice: once in the act, and again in the telling. Accuracy here is not pedantry; it is fidelity—to fact and to victim.

II. “Meritocracy Made Them Powerful”

Later, in discussing the infamous “Epstein class”—the network of elites drawn into his orbit—the author writes:

“Meritocracy made them powerful, global markets made them rich—and now Epstein is making them reviled.”

The claim regarding meritocracy invites pause.

But one example: Public filings, including litigation involving JPMorgan Chase and the U.S. Virgin Islands, reveal not merely talent rewarded in open competition, but networks of privilege, tax incentives exceeding $300 million, waived monitoring requirements, political facilitation, and a dense web of personal relationships. Connections, patronage, regulatory indulgence, and institutional protection appear far more prominently than disinterested merit.

To attribute such power and wealth simply to “meritocracy” is to sanitize a far more complicated—and less flattering—reality. Words such as “network,” “patronage,” “access,” or even “self-dealing” may lack rhetorical elegance, but they better capture the structural features at issue with Epstein and those who fluttered about him.

When language flatters arrangements sustained by proximity and protection, it ceases to describe and begins to launder.

III. Free Markets and Capitalism

A third passage reads:

“The twin ideals of free markets and globalization have received a bad rap since the financial crisis of 2007–2009 (perhaps the only event to end more careers than Epstein).”

The parenthetical may amuse. The larger problem is conceptual.

Free markets and capitalism are not synonyms. A free market describes a system of voluntary exchange governed by price signals and competition. Capitalism, as historically practiced, encompasses a broader architecture: capital accumulation, corporate forms, regulatory frameworks, financial engineering, and—particularly in recent decades—large-scale leverage intertwined with state backstops.

The crisis of 2007–2009 was not the collapse of voluntary exchange. It was the implosion of highly leveraged financial instruments, moral hazard embedded in “too big to fail” institutions, regulatory capture, and risk privatized in gain yet socialized in loss.

To conflate free markets with the excesses of financialized capitalism is rhetorically efficient but analytically imprecise. It encourages rejection of one when the failure lay largely in the other. Surely an author for The Economist knows better even if most readers, especially in America, do not. He should be more careful than to reinforce ignorance and such linguistic collapse.

None of these examples is catastrophic in isolation. Yet taken together, they illustrate how easily moral clarity erodes when vocabulary drifts.

The choice between “girls” and “young women” alters the gravity of a crime.

The choice between “meritocracy” and “networked privilege” reframes responsibility.

The conflation of “free markets” and “capitalism” obscures structural cause.

Language is not decoration. It is architecture. When beams are mislabeled, the structure leans.

Precision is not severity; it is honesty. And honesty, in public writing, remains the first obligation.