New Wrinkles on the English Language

A lot of people are worried about the eroding stock market, the collapse of the dot-coms, a tidal wave of pending layoffs and monthly electric bills that will soon rival mortgage payments for obscene bloat.

But not me.

I’m not worried because I focus doggedly on the good news, and today that means tipping my hat to the folks at the California Prune Board.

Pardon me. They’re not at the California Prune Board. As of about a week ago, they shed the unpleasant term “prune” and became the California Dried Plum Board.

In any event, I have to commend them for contributing the beautiful and evocative “dried plum” to everyday English.

Or is it Dried French that we speak around here?

I’m sorry. This thing is infectious. Once you head down the road of language-enhanced reality, it’s tough to stop. In fact, it’s more fun than a bowl of prunes.

Or dried plums, as they are now labeled in the supermarkets, on brightly colored packages adorned with pictures of things that look a lot like prunes.

Thanks to the dried plum board, all those ominous headlines roll right past me these days.

For if prunes can turn into dried plums at the wave of a linguistic wand, frightening concepts like “rolling blackouts” can be similarly transformed. All it takes is a willingness to kill--I mean, put to sleep--words that have outlived their usefulness.

You could call it “euphemasia,” if there were such a word. Come to think of it, there is: I just said so!

Memo to Ventura County’s lemon growers: You might be making billions off lemons but lemon is a terrible, sour name! Are you selling used cars or sunshine in a skin?

How about: “Extreme apples”?

Memo to Gov. Davis: No more “rolling blackouts”! The term reeks of war and drunken stupor and neither makes anyone feel very good.

How about: “Periods of communal twilight”?

Is that warm? Is it as poetic as “Hiawatha”? Would the state have to borrow $10 billion--$300 for every man, woman and child--if the only thing we had to fear from a shortage of electrons was an occasional period of communal twilight?

And this “recession” that everyone’s fretting about: It has to go.

Recession is about diseased gums. It’s about my hairline. It’s not a suitable word for our economic circumstances.

How about: “Fiscal naptime”? Is that user-friendly? Is it as inviting as flannel sheets on a cold night? Would we have to torment ourselves with horrific visions of layoffs (I mean,”job relaxation”) if the only thing we feared was fiscal naptime?

Of course, I shouldn’t have to remind government officials--people who refer to crushing taxes as “revenue enhancement”--about the magic of the well-chosen word.

But with so much fear in the air these days, they can afford to take a few tips from the California Dried Plum Board.

Until recently, the people trying to sell the fruit formerly known as prunes were having a huge problem, for the very word had come to be associated with old people requiring laxative assistance.

In cultures where elders are respected for their wisdom, particularly when it comes to cleansing the digestive tract, this would have been a plus. But in our youth-obsessed society, “prune” and everything associated with it came to be seen as a negative.

In this country, expressions like “wrinkled as a prune” and references to family members as “you miserable, loathsome prune” are seldom taken as compliments.

Prunes, then, were a tough sell--just as “Patagonian toothfish” was shunned by diners before it became known as Chilean sea bass.

In the last two years, focus groups comprised of the fruit’s new target audience--women 35 to 50--went wild over “dried plums,” said Peggy Castaldi, the board’s marketing director.

“They don’t really hear the ‘dried’ part,” she said. “They just hear the ‘plum’--and everyone likes plums.”

Another option, Castaldi said, was “black gold.”

Fortunately, the focus groups rejected it.

“Black gold” might be a passable term for oil, but it would be a misleading and cruel name for prunes.

What could be more immoral than telling some poor guy who’s just been laid off that prunes are really gold--especially in a recession?

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at https://steve.chawkins@latimes.com or at 653-7561.