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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

"Cleaning up". Really? When companies say "cleaning up" they are trying to convey the idea that their environmental disaster is a bit like spilling milk in the kitchen. Sure it's unfortunate, but all will be fine after it's "cleaned up".

Just needs a bit of a wipe down and a mop and all good.

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I was interning at Exxon during the BP oil spill. Back then there was all the same talk about cleanup, but at the end of the day "cleanup" amounted to Exxon quietly recommending a coagulation agent that bound the oil into small globs and sunk it under the surface. If I remember right the oil globs would sink something like 10-15 feet, just enough that you'd see less oil oil on the surface.

I also had family on the Alabama gulf coast at the time. They were finding globs of oil on the beach for a few years after "everything was cleaned up"

For the record, the term "cleaning up" was only used in this article. The official term Norfolk Southern used in their press releases was "monitor and mitigate environmental issues" which does seem more accurate.

This too sounds a tad euphemistic to me.

What would be a better word/phrase in this case?

disaster recovery process?

Contaminant/hazard/whatever mitigation

Remediation is the word environmental cleanup companies often use. Essentially just removing the top ten or fifteen feet of soil and saying "all clean". Interestingly, all a company needs to do to demonstrate that an area is clean is provide x number of groundwater samples that show clean. What officials ignore is that there might be forty or fifty not-clean samples that are ignored in favour of the, say, five clear samples required. Dirty stuff.

little bit of a sprucing /s

What a weird and inconsequential thing to take offense by. Nothing in the term 'cleaning up' insinuates that it will be fine or that its not a big deal. What you really should be angry over is the spill, not that after-the-fact communication.

OP is agreeing with you. "Cleaning up" is a euphemism we should move beyond. At best, they are "mitigating" the spill and that's probably the word the media should use.

No OP and I are not agreeing. Cause its not a euphemism. They are cleaning up their spill. Will it make everything like before? No. But that doesn't makes the term an euphemism. The other ideas in this thread are more newspeak by a longshot.

"Cleaning Up" when compared to spilled milk like the OP says implies that it will be the way it was before. The term is more positive than the reality so I would personally call it a euphemism.

Thats all on your and OPs own feelings of the term. Something being cleaned up will never be mint again. So you could just a well argue that 'cleaning up' points to something being permanently degraded. In the end loose semantic associations are not universal and OPs critique is a personal emotional response that removes focus from the actual problem here.

I can assure you that word choice is not arbitrary in a shitshow as large as this. Its PR Crisis management 101.

Word choice means everything because it can be the difference in accountability. I guarantee you they are hoping for said effect on the 'audience'/public.

The irony here is that the company did not use the word cleanup, The reporters did.

If you want people to be angry about the spill, communications that imply the spill is a temporary thing that is/can be "cleaned up" serve to work against that initial anger.

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