Euphemistic language sanitizes harmful acts into innocuous equivalents.

Evidence

The participants in the conspiracy spoke in euphemisms that masked and sanitized their unlawful activities. “Meeting with” and “speaking to” competitors meant price-fixing and bid rigging. To “stabilize prices” meant to rig them. The “problem” was the violation of antitrust law. Conspiratorial meetings became “social meetings.” GE gained a reputation for speaking in “vague and elliptical” ways. The company adopted a covert code of communication: the “code of the wink,” which was a surreptitious, nonverbal way for officials to authorize illegal antitrust activities. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1390

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete examples of euphemistic labeling, one of Bandura’s four moral disengagement loci - sanitizing language to disinhibit harmful conduct.
• XREF: The euphemistic relabeling mechanism parallels how policy language reframes exclusionary/coercive state measures in neutral bureaucratic terms. — connects to: Euphemistic language like ‘collateral damage’ severs accountability for harm — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1281
• SHARE: The ‘code of the wink’ at GE - a nonverbal way to authorize illegal price-fixing while avoiding written record - is the kind of detail an antitrust/org-behavior friend would relish.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1390