For today’s new-to-me words I have a collection of words that all follow a pattern, which is what I want to concentrate on:
- humanewashing
- sportswashing
- purpose-washing
- mathwashing
As you see, these all involve the -washing suffix. The original for this pattern is whitewashing, which describes behavior that’s “specious or deceptive […] that attempts to gloss over failings and defects.” At least as far back as 1989, people were using the derived word greenwashing for when companies hid some of their less admirable behaviors behind a façade of environmentalism. (I have a distinct memory of energy companies running ads that talked about all the forests they were planting—yeah, after they’d pit-mined entire mountains.)
The -washing suffix is productive, as they say, to describe any similar attempt to use something positive-sounding to mislead or to legitimize. The first part of the word identifies the thing that the, um, washer is hiding behind. Let’s have a look at the individual terms.
humanewashing. This term accuses companies that produce animal products of falsely advertising that they treat animals humanely. You’ve undoubtedly seen packages at the grocery store with labels that claim that the products come from free-range chickens, ethically raised pigs, and so on. This –washing term was invented by people who don’t believe these claims.
sportswashing. This term accuses organizations of sponsoring sports teams in order to generate goodwill with the public. For example, according to one article, mining and energy companies in Australia sponsor sports teams from local teams all the way to national ones. (Per the article, the Australian Open has an “official natural gas partner,” which makes no sense outside of sportswashing.) Some countries have attempted to sportswash their international images by hosting the Olympics, Formula One races, or the World Cup. Apparently the term sportswashing was popularized by Amnesty International, which focuses on sportswashing by countries whose human-rights records are not great.
purpose-washing. This term accuses companies of advertising a “purpose” that supposedly guides their design principles, behavior, and their very existence. This purpose-ness is promoted both to consumers of a company’s products and to its potential employees. But again, the washing suffix suggests that people don’t always buy it. For example, Facebook is cited as a company that has attempted to purpose-wash itself by telling a story that it’s “good for the world,” but a lot of people maintain that it’s too obvious that the company’s sole purpose is to sell ads.
mathwashing. This term (which I covered before) accuses people of using “the objective connotations of math terms to describe products and features that are probably more subjective than their users might think.” For decades, asserting that something is done by computer has been a way to suggest precision and accuracy. Now especially, in our age of big data and machine learning, we might put too much stock in what one commenter called data worship, which can make it easy for people to sell us ideas that maybe ain’t all that.
So those are some washing terms that are all ultimately derive from whitewashing. If you spot others, let me know!
Update: Another example is sharewashing, which accuses companies of hiding for-profit transactions behind a supposed sharing model.
Update (11 Dec 23): From the interesting English in Progress blog/newsletter/substack I learned about fun-washing, which is “the idea of cleansing toxic or repellent individuals or ideas by re-locating them into the heart of light entertainment.” An article in BellaCaledonia talks about “fun-washing fascism.”
For origins, an unexpected etymology. We live not far from a cemetery. We were driving by it not long ago and my wife read the sign and asked, “What’s a mausoleum, exactly?”
We looked it up and established first that a mausoleum is a building that contains a tomb. The Great Pyramid in Egypt is a mausoleum, as is the Taj Mahal. The pickled body of Lenin is on display in a mausoleum in Red Square in Moscow. There’s Grant’s Tomb, of course. The Qinshihuang Ling Mausoleum in China entombs the first Qin emperor along with 8000 terracotta soldiers to protect the emperor in the afterlife.
We also looked up the origin. My guess was that mausoleum probably derived from a Greek word for “tomb” or something like that. I didn’t even get the Greek part right. The original mausoleum was built for King Mausolus, a Persian ruler from the 4th century B.C.E. This makes mausoleum another eponym, i.e., a word that is based on someone’s name. I am continually astonished at how many of our words turn out to be eponyms.
As a point of interest, Mausolus’s tomb was one of the original seven wonders of the ancient world. Unlike most of those, a bit of the original mausoleum still exists.
Our local cemetery doesn’t have a grand, wonder-of-the-world structure in it as far as I’ve seen. Maybe the next time I drive by, I’ll stop and see what their mausoleum is all about.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
Does it count as purposewashing if you teach your employees to have the actual values?
the answer to that is of course yes it can. But how long do you have to teach your values for before everyone at the company either does the right thing, or believes they’re doing the right thing?
I think that the -washing suffix is specific to situations where the organization is trying to hide its behavior behind a screen of a socially acceptable “purpose.” All companies have purposes. Some act in accordance with those purposes. Some don’t bother to try to hide their true purpose. Then there are the purpose-washers, who say one thing but do another.