Some terms are obviously euphemisms fabricated in order to evade. When you say you “slept with” someone last night, the appropriate question in reply isn’t about how rested you feel. Others, usually business or journalistic buzzwords, are better disguised; they are partial euphemisms. When you refer to a “developing country,” it might be appropriate to ask at what pace the economy is growing, or it might be appropriate to ask whether this week the dictator is responding to hyperinflation by ordering soldiers to fire into crowds. That’s the thing about euphemisms and slippery language, they are designed to tell you with a nudge what to think in advance, so you don’t ask too many inconvenient questions.
But some euphemisms are naturally occurring. Whenever it came into existence, the term “prep school” (college preparatory school, that is) was not a euphemism. It was direct, not slippery. It was a way of referring to a school organized around preparing students for the scholarly challenges of college. But I got to thinking about it as I, along with the entire media, have become captivated by the sheer grossness of the college admissions scandal, in which Hollywood celebrities and other muckety-mucks bought kids into college for huge dollar values by bribing the gatekeepers in admissions or for athletic team scholarships.
The stories can be read merely as a juicy window into the weird and sordid world of the rich and famous. But it makes me think about prep schools. In a flurry of reporting and editorializing about this story, nobody seems to have found that the kids who by all “meritorious” rights should not have been able to make it to these colleges couldn’t hack it once they bribed their ways in. They didn’t fail out or drop out.
What does this tell us? There was a time when you might need a “preparatory” high school because you actually had to be prepared to hack it in college, to have certain skills in order to pass tests, or else you would fail. No more. College is a holding tank you hang out in while you wait to get a letter saying you can go get a high-class job now, which we call a diploma, and the only preparation you need is your acceptance letter.
Where do such things as preparing the mind, scholarship, learning, mastery of a subject, curiosity, and intellectual inquiry enter into this picture? They don’t. Colleges dropped all that frippery, or they’re in the process of it at least. And just like that, they made “prep schools” into euphemisms.
