There are certain words that pop up frequently in news stories and set off alarms in an editor’s brain.
Several of them appeared in our report last week about an actual alarm that was set off by a worker at the shut-down Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth. The worker had been accidentally exposed to enough radiation that the plant’s monitors were tripped — for several weeks running, according to an anonymous letter from an apparent whistleblower at the plant. Holtec International, the company that now owns and is decommissioning the reactor, acknowledged that a worker had been inadvertently contaminated but downplayed the seriousness of the exposure.
Patrick O’Brien, the Holtec spokesman, said the incident, which he referred to as a “personnel contamination event,” had been promptly reported and that an “investigation into the cause of the event is ongoing.”
Note that what happened was not an accident, according to O’Brien. It was an event — a word that is conveniently generic and colorless, lacking any suggestion that something might have actually gone wrong. (Let’s also note that Holtec’s “investigation” is ongoing — an adjective favored by the authorities when what they are really doing is nothing.)
Who does Holtec report such “events” to, anyway? The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) — which maintains its own lexicon of weasel words.
As Christine Legere reported last week, “The anonymous letter described other problems: a severed 480-volt power cable ‘almost electrocuting several workers,’ and an incident Holtec had originally reported as a ‘heat event’ but which was later reclassified as a ‘fire event’ by the NRC.”
I guess I’m glad that the NRC hesitated at “heat event,” but what might a “fire event” be? I’m imagining a circus act with lions jumping through flaming hoops. Why not just call it “a fire”? The reason is obfuscation — making it as hard as possible for people to know what really happened by adding layers of vagueness and ambiguity.
We’ve been watching the proliferation of “events” for years now in everything from “active shooter events” to the weather: “storm events,” “wind events,” and “hurricane events.” Fox Weather warned the other day of a “significant severe weather event expected next week.” If that isn’t vague enough for you, there’s this headline from an agency in Oregon: “Weather Event Coming to a City Near You.”
“Weather event” and its cousins have been officially added to the Indie’s list of banned words along with impactful, informational, concerning (when used as an adjective meaning “alarming”), iconic, and lived experience.
In a previous column explaining my objection to concerning as an adjective, I wrote that what most bothered me was the word’s blandness. It’s used to obscure instead of illuminate things.
Neil Sheehan, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman, said that the federal agency sends inspectors to the Pilgrim nuclear plant regularly, “including when risk-significant activities are taking place.” It sounds as if there might be some dangerous things going on over there, but when people talk like that it’s hard to know for sure.
