This Week June 27, 1990. Page M7

_ CANADA, EH?

There’s no hiding place left

he lesson today con-

cerns euphemisms.

Linguistic muzak.

The pretty words and
punchless phrases we use to
cushion and deodorize our
thoughts.

“Passing on” ;is a popular
euphemism. So much softer
and unfinal than “dying”,
“croaking” or “biting the dust.”

Pt

Basie-Blaeic

By ARTHUR BLACK

“Expecting” -- and there’s
another dandy euphemism.
It’s vague and sexless, unlike
such straightforward vul-
garisms as “pregnant”, “in
calf” or “carrying a bun in the
oven”.

The military world is a
veritable compost heap of
euphemisms. They're the folks
who gave us the “anti-person-
nel device” (read lethal ex-

PRICES EFFECTIV
JUNE 27 - JULY 3, 1990

plosive designed to shred flesh
and pulverize bone). And who
can forget “nuclear deterrent”
(read annihilation of life
coupled with long-term planet
poisoning.

There’s another euphemism

currently making the rounds. _

It’s a real late-twentieth cen-
tury cutie.

Sanitary landfill.

Roll it around on your tongue
once or twice. Sanitary
Landfill. Might almost be the
name of a new complexion
cream. “Sanitary” -- nice,
clean, inoffensive adjective .. .
“landfill” -- something to en-
rich the soil and eradicate all
those unseemly pocks and
craters.

It sounds almost as if we're
doing the world a favor.

In fact, we're unloading our
crap.

Shrink wrap, old grocery
bags, bald tires, rusty bedspr-
ings, breakfast crusts, kitty
litter -- not to mention greases,
solvents, acids, alkalies and
mad chemist’s brew of toxic,
cancerous gunk too various to
catalogue.

And if we can believe the
headlines, we're running out of
places to bury the stuff. The
city of Toronto, that
megalomaniacatropolis on the
barely flowing Humber, is cur-
rently dispatching outriders to
most of the townships and

counties within garbage haul-
ing distance of its borders.
They hope to strike a deal with
somebody -- anybody -- who
will agree to take Hogtown’s
garbage.

Toronto's not alone. There’s
not a Canadian city or town of
any consequence that has to
look too deeply into it’s
municipal crystal ball to see
the garbage piling up.

And this is in Canada -- an
underpopulated country with
nearly four million square
miles of back yard!

Makes you wonder what they
do in less capacious countries.
Is Portugal sinking under the
weight of its trash? Is Belgium
up to its eavestroughs in Glad
Bags? What about England?

Actually, we don’t have to
wonder about one city in
England. An ex-citizen of Not-

tingham recently wrote an ex-
planatory letter to the editor of
a Toronto newspaper.

The letter-writer, one Ben
Banham, recalled walking to
school past a building known
as The Destructor. Inside the
building,“the waste was
dumped on conveyor belts and
sorted by hand. All metal was
first removed, except cans, and
sent to scrap metal yards.
Butcher bones were sorted out
and finished as bone meal for

gardens; bottles and glass jars
were removed and recycled.
The remainder went through
the furnace and finished as
ashes and cans. The cans were
boiled and went to steel mills.
That left tons of ashes which
had two uses. They were
mixed with cement and made
into cinder blocks . . . (which)
were used to line the inside of
the brick-built houses, also as
partition walls inside, and
plastered...”

“It would be fair to say”
writes Mister Banham, “that
scores of the numerous soccer
stadiums in the country used
tons of ashes for several inches
of drainage under the turf.

Result: Nothing wasted.”
Indeed. Mister Banham says
The Destructor handled and

disposed of all the garbage of
Nottingham, an industrialized
city of 300,000.

But Mister Banham is wrong
on one count. Something was
wasted: the lesson we ought to
have learned from Nottin-
gham.

Ben Banham is a senior
citizen and The Destructor is a
hazy memory. All the facts and
figures cited above were true
only when Ben Banham was a
Nottingham lad.

And that was
years ago.

seventy-five

\)

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