I sometimes think about euphemisms for things that operate to negate their true nature and make them palatable for populaces that need their consentanufactured.

“Defense” used to describe all military expenditures and structures, particularly for the United States, which has spent nearly all of its “defense” efforts on aggression and territorial domination thousands of miles from its borders. It is conspicuous in how diligently it is used by certain groups, particularly large corporate media orgs, think tanks, and bourgeois politicians. There is, at minimum, an unconscious recognition that (the “good guys’”) war must always be framed in the language of defense. For them to describe, for example, the wars on Iraq or Afghanistan as wars of aggresson, which they absolutely were even by liberal definitions, is almost unthinkable. No, the “bunker busters” used exclusively on foreign countries must be “defense”.

“Heritage” to describe a white supremacist pining for chattel slavery in the South. Goes hand in hand with, “the peculiar institution” and “states’ rights”.

The (very deep, usually unconscious nowadays) allusions to vast “natural” spaces that were actually occupied by indigenous people for millennia. Indigenous people that faced a genocide by the same institutions that designate the spaces as official wilderness for its own members. Spinning a deep fiction around the meaning and history of these spaces.

A lot of language is like this. Whitewashed to avoid the horror of what they really mean.