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February 12th, 2025 (Permalink)

How to Tell Half-Truths with Photographs1

When you think of fake photographs today, you may think of Photoshop or even "deep fakes" generated by computers. Before the advent of digital photography, it was impossible to use such sophisticated means to create misleading photographs, and cruder techniques were used such as double exposures and airbrushing. An even simpler technique is cropping, that is, simply cutting off part of the photograph. The resulting photo would not be a false image, but a true image that tells only part of the story: the photographic equivalent of a half-truth.

Cropping is innocently used to change the composition of a photograph or to remove unwanted parts of the image, and no one should object to that. The problem occurs when cropping hides important parts of the picture. Consider the cover of a recent issue of New York magazine2―shown to the above right.

The story illustrated on the cover, "The Cruel Kids' Table"3, is a lengthy first-person account of the author's attendance at a party for internet "influencers" celebrating Donald Trump's inauguration as president. As one might expect, the "young, imposingly well connected, urban, and very online" party-goers are portrayed in a negative light. It's a sort of left-wing version of "Radical Chic", the famous article by Tom Wolfe―which was also published in New York4, amazingly enough. If only the author, Brock Colyar, wrote half as well as Wolfe.

The article claims that "almost everyone [at the party] is white", which is a very vague claim and almost impossible to falsify. How many non-whites would have to be there for it to be false? Moreover, who counts as non-white? The cover of the magazine seems to support this claim since not a single non-white person is shown. Nonetheless, at the top of the article itself is the photograph shown below from which the cover was clearly cropped. New York Magazine Story

I've added white lines to show how the cover was cropped from the full photo, and it's obvious that it was no accident the three black attendees in the left-hand side of the image were cropped out. The left cropping line―which determines where the right line must fall in order for the resulting image to fit the cover dimensions―just grazes the right side of the head of the black man in the blue jacket. There's no obvious compositional reason why the image should be cropped just there. Cropped

Because it's a crowd shot, from a visual standpoint, any cropping that adjusted the dimensions of the photo to fit the cover would have worked compositionally. In particular, chopping off the right side would have brought the beautiful young women in the lower left hand corner of the cover closer to its center and leave all three black attendees in frame; here's what that would have looked like, without the magazine logo, story title, and teaser―see the image to the right. I, of course, cropped the original photo to make this point, but that just goes to show that there's nothing inherently wrong with cropping.

If the magazine had not included the uncropped photograph at the top of the article, it's doubtful that the cropping would have ever been discovered. This highlights why cropping is such an insidious technique: you can't tell by simply looking at a photograph that something important has been left out. Moreover, unlike PhotoShopped pictures, there are no tell-tale clues in the image that reveal that it has been manipulated5.

In comparison, there are several additional photos sprinkled throughout the article, none of which show any non-white faces. Did the photographer avoid taking any photos of non-white partygoers? Did the photo editor carefully avoid printing any such photos that the photographer took? Were any of the printed photos cropped to remove non-whites? We'll probably never know.


Notes:

  1. Previous entries in this series:
  2. "Issue Contents", New York, 1/27/2025.
  3. Brock Colyar, "The Cruel Kids' Table", New York, 1/27/2025. Warning: Contains once offensive language.
  4. Tom Wolfe, "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's", New York, 6/8/1970. Warning: Contains now offensive language and misspelled French phrases.
  5. Compare the photograph discussed in: Seeing is Disbelieving, 3/13/2024.

Doublespeak
February 4th, 2025 (Permalink)

21st Century Doublespeak, Part 21

Over fifteen years ago, I documented the phrase "undocumented immigrant" as a euphemism for "illegal alien"2. Google's Ngram viewer shows that "illegal alien" was rather rare from about a century ago until the late 1960s when it shot up, peaking in the late 1970s3. In contrast, "undocumented immigrant" was virtually nonexistent prior to 1970, after which its occurrences gradually increased until they peaked in 2017. Surprisingly, the euphemism didn't surpass in frequency the older phrase until 2016.

William Lutz, in his book Doublespeak Defined from 1999, defines "illegal alien" as "undocumented worker"4. The Ngram viewer shows the latter phrase also nearly nonexistent prior to 1970 when it suddenly surged, peaked ten years later, declined for about a decade, then spiked once more around 1990, hit a lower peak in 2006, then declined since5. So, the word "undocumented" seems to have been introduced around 1970 as a euphemism for "illegal" when applied to immigrants.

I've previously discussed what I call "euphemism inflation"6, which is the way that euphemisms wear out over time and must be replaced. This is why there are so many euphemisms for people who bury dead people, that is, undertakers, morticians, and funeral directors. In fact, there doesn't seem to be a non-euphemistic word for the job. Obviously, dealing with dead bodies is unpleasant, and people don't like to think about death, so a euphemism is de rigueur. However, over time the euphemism becomes tainted by association with the job, and a new one becomes necessary.

Given the phenomenon of euphemism inflation, we can predict that any given euphemism will eventually lose much of its euphemistic force, and there will be a felt need to replace it. Given that "undocumented" has been used as a euphemism, coupled with "worker" or "immigrant", for over a half-century, it is surely past time for replacement. This brings us to the USA Today news report that prompted this entry, which begins with a "Story Summary", probably prepared by an editor, in which we read:

The Laken Riley Act would require ICE to detain immigrants without legal permission who commit theft-related crimes. The bill, named after a Georgia nursing student killed by an immigrant without legal permission, passed with bipartisan support and now heads to the Senate.7

When I first read this, I was confused because the first sentence sounds as though the immigrants in question lacked legal permission to commit thefts, which should go without saying; either that or it was Immigration and Customs Enforcement that lacked permission to detain them, which makes no sense given that the Act in question requires ICE to do so. Similarly, the second sentence seems to say that an immigrant lacked legal permission to kill a student which, again, should be unnecessary to mention.

However, the first sentence of the article itself clears up the mystery: "The new Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed its first bill Tuesday, the Laken Riley Act, named for the 22-year-old Georgia nursing school student killed by a Venezuelan immigrant living in the country without legal permission." So, the immigrant lacked legal permission to live in this country rather than to steal or murder.

Thus, the phrase "immigrant living in the country without legal permission", and the truncated "immigrant without legal permission", appear to be attempts to create a new euphemism for the taboo "illegal immigrant"8? The phrase "illegal alien" occurs once in the article, but only in a quote of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, whereas the word "undocumented" never appears.

While wordiness is often a feature, not a bug, of doublespeak9, the full phrase is rather a mouthful and the truncations lead to ambiguous sentences, such as those quoted above from the summary. For this reason, I doubt that this particular attempt at replacing "undocumented immigrant" will succeed, but it is evidence that "undocumented" has overstayed its welcome.


Notes:

  1. For part one, see: 21st Century Doublespeak, 1/18/2025.
  2. Documented Doublespeak, 9/16/2009.
  3. "illegal alien,undocumented immigrant", Google Books Ngram Viewer, accessed: 2/4/2025.
  4. William Lutz, Doublespeak Defined: Cut Through the Bull**** and Get the Point (1999), p. 58.
  5. "undocumented worker", Google Books Ngram Viewer, accessed: 2/4/2025.
  6. See, for instance: Doublespeak Dictionary, 1/14/2010.
  7. Fernando Cervantes Jr., "House passes Laken Riley Act, which heads to Senate with increasing Democratic support", USA Today, 1/8/2025.
  8. Oddly, the article does include the phrase "immigrants in the United States illegally", which means the same thing as "illegal immigrants".
  9. See: Another New Four-Letter Word, 6/5/2020.

February 2nd, 2025 (Permalink)

Headline

Arctic Blast Prompts Rapid Turtle Rescue Efforts*

Isn't "rapid turtle" an oxymoron? Also, shouldn't they concentrate on the slower ones?


*"Arctic Blast Prompts Rapid Turtle Rescue Efforts", The Weather Channel, 1/29/2025


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