Watch Your Language: Pedophilia, Gang Rape & Erroneous Reporting

“If this came to court and I were an expert witness, I think I would have a pretty good argument to say that these reporters are actually reporting the story wrong, that what they are saying is untrue,” says Dr. Muffy Siegel, associate professor of English at Temple University and forensic semanticist.

“We know that what comes in the subject position of ‘have sex with’ is someone who is actively and willingly having sex,” explains Dr. Siegel. “That’s part of the definition of the verb. Since it’s part of the definition … it’s a false statement to say that that little girl had sex with those men, because she wasn’t a willing agent.”

Siegel says that for a similar but technically distinct reason, the way Fox News described what the pedophile attorney did to the 12-year-old as having “a sexual relationship with” the boy is also incorrect.

She says the phrase belongs to a class called ‘symmetric verbs,’ which in layman’s terms means the action has to be consensual.

“It is false to use the verb if they both weren’t agents in it, and clearly they were not,” says Dr. Siegel.

Unfortunately, the issue isn’t just that Fox News is a geyser blowing steaming piles of bullshit into our brains (though of course, it does). They’re not alone. I’ve heard Oprah say “had sex with” when she meant rape, for chrissakes.

But it’s wrong. “[The listener] has in fact literally been told that the children were agents in this activity,” says Dr. Siegel.

We all know that euphemisms like adult entertainment or friendly fire or whirling, for locals who remember Philly media’s whimsical euphemism for the spate of sexual assaults at the Greek Picnic in the late ’90s-are dangerous. They’re new terms for old ideas that obscure and soften the old idea. George Carlin called it soft language.

“Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason, it keeps getting worse,” said Carlin, more than 20 years ago.

Carlin’s beef was with word choice for war veteran’s psychological trauma. In the First World War, it was shell shock. In the second, it was battle fatigue. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn’t seem to hurt as much. The Korean War’s operational exhaustion became the Vietnam War’s post-traumatic stress disorder.

The language used by Fox News here is even more dangerous because it’s like a new breed of euphemism hidden in plain sight. The language exists already. It’s the language of the perpetrator-and his defense team. It’s language that takes the point of view of the attacker-it was consensual; we had sex but I didn’t rape her, man.

Update: Just a note/clarification: Since I was writing a column, I began by describing the most recent example of witnessing a dangerous semantic mistake, which was on the news after American Idol, which is on Fox. Even though I wrote that other outlets have made the same mistake-including Oprah, to demonstrate how pervasive-it seems some people can’t get past that the column’s starting point was Fox. So I’ll say it again: other outlets have also used the terms “had sex with” or “had a sexual relationship with” when they mean the rape or assault of children, and that sucks too. Not the majority, but some. OK then! Thanks.

This post originally appeared on the website of Philadelphia Weekly. Republished with permission.