Think It’s Not Cool to Call a Fat Person a Fat Person?
Here’s What to Say Instead
I was just reading a New Yorker article about health and longevity in which a woman was quoted as saying to her husband, “I think you should work on being a little less not thin.”
“Congratulations, lady!” I wanted to tell her. “You win the award for the most convoluted way of telling someone, ‘You’re fat.’”
She probably just meant to be kind. Instead, she was kind of confusing.
Clarity or Cruelty?
But we all get where she’s coming from. Everyone agrees that it isn’t cool or kind to call somebody “fat” to their face.
But as a writer, I had questions. Calling somebody “fat” to their face is different, it seemed to me, from describing somebody as fat when writing about them.
When you’re writing, using a descriptive term is usually better than using a euphemism, which is why I always thought of “fat” as being a better description than “rounded” or “curvy.”
Using euphemisms, or convoluted statements like that woman in The New Yorker piece, just wasn’t good writing. Or was it?
