Since time immemorial, cultures have attempted to euphemistically gussy up the profession most of us simply know as "prostitution." Castro's Cuba has its "tourism consultants"; World War II-era Japanese soldiers had their Korean "comfort women"; Ukraine has its "entertainers." And now the U.S. government has joined the fun, so to speak, with a notification from the United States Agency for International Development (AID) to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about its latest Congo policy.
AID proudly touted its AIDS-prevention "condom social marketing strategies," which were targeted at "commercial sex workers" (as opposed to nonprofit sex workers?). AID's linguistic sleight of hand was enough to have Garrett Grigsby, the committee's Republican deputy staff director, seeing scarlet. He fired off a memo to the agency, pointing out that "commercial sex worker" is "bad English . . . why use a three-word phrase when a one-word alternative would do?" Likewise, Grigsby helpfully instructed that "such silly names" make "AID a laughingstock. Do you have any idea the belly-laughs provided to us simply by reading official AID program notifications?" Finally, Grigsby pointed out that the term was a metaphor for the general failure of foreign aid: "Because AID has contributed to removing the shame associated with being a prostitute, it is more difficult to stop people from prostituting themselves."
The bad news for Grigsby is that AID doesn't seem terribly anxious to start calling a whore a whore. The good news is, we now have a handy euphemism for ill-conceived, moronic bureaucratese. Just call it an "AID program notification."