Casualty: The World’s Favorite Euphemism for People We’d Rather Not Count

Casualty, n. – a word the world keeps in its back pocket like a crumpled receipt for something it never meant to buy. From Kyiv’s shell-pocked maternity wards to California’s smouldering subdivisions, the term is waved about by generals, insurers, and TikTok livestreamers alike, each polishing the same grim syllables until they shine with bespoke significance. One man’s collateral damage is another’s quarterly actuarial column; both agree the decimal point is sacred.

Start with the ledger. The UN politely estimates 6,000 documented civilian deaths in Ukraine since February 2022, a figure that fits comfortably in a press release. Meanwhile, WHO guesses an extra 56 million annual deaths worldwide due to pandemic-related disruptions—numbers so large they require scientific notation, which conveniently erases faces. Somewhere between the two lies the sweet spot where conscience can snooze: not small enough to feel personally guilty, not large enough to demand we cancel dinner plans. Global compassion, it turns out, has a Goldilocks threshold.

Travel east and casualty wears a hazmat suit. China’s “zero-COVID” campaign chalked up an impressive roster of psychological casualties: toddlers separated from parents, pets beaten to death by overzealous volunteers who, one suspects, finally found a state-sanctioned outlet for adolescent aggression. Beijing later revised the definition of “close contact” so narrowly that epidemiologists needed new rulers; suddenly, nobody qualified for grief counselling. The Party prefers its casualties statistically anorexic.

Head south to the Sahel, where casualty has swapped bullets for barbed wire. European border externalisation means Nigerien soldiers now patrol dunes on behalf of Frontex, turning Tuareg nomads into unlisted entries in someone else’s spreadsheet. When a German minister thanks them for “protecting our shared values,” the shared part is doing a lot of heavy lifting; the values apparently include sunburn and outsourced mortality. Nobody issues commemorative stamps for heatstroke in the Sahara.

In the Americas, casualty dons a school backpack. The U.S. ended 2023 with 656 mass shootings—enough to re-stage the Battle of Gettysburg twice over, though with less historical significance and significantly worse merchandising. Congress responds with moments of silence, a renewable resource that emits no carbon and even less courage. South of the border, Mexico’s murder statistics are so robust they’ve become an export commodity, feeding true-crime podcasts from Oslo to Osaka. Death sells; subtitles provided.

The corporate world, never one to miss a branding opportunity, now packages casualty as “externalities.” A cobalt mine collapses in the DRC? That’s just the cost of keeping Tesla’s share price vertically ambitious. Apple’s suppliers in Chennai report a 27% rise in worker suicides? The ESG report will mention “increased mental-health awareness initiatives” right next to glossy photos of smiling orphans receiving refurbished iPads. Nothing says empathy like a pre-installed screen protector.

Even the climate, traditionally non-partisan, has learned to issue invoices. Pakistan’s 2022 floods created 33 million instant climate refugees, a figure that handily doubles as the population of Canada. Meanwhile, ski resorts in the Alps truck in snow from Antarctica—because nothing fights global warming like burning diesel to relocate frozen water. The Alps themselves are casualties now, reduced to oversized postcard props for influencers who caption them #NeverForget right before flying private to Dubai.

What unites these vignettes is the universal human talent for grammatical alchemy. We downgrade “people” to “casualties,” then downgrade “casualties” to “data,” at which point moral fatigue becomes a manageable quarterly expense. The verb shifts accordingly: people die, casualties occur, data fluctuates. Linguistic distancing for the age of drone footage and push-notification grief.

So here we are, citizens of a planet that treats tragedy like a streaming service—skip intro, binge outrage, cancel subscription before the free trial ends. The algorithm remembers what we don’t: every casualty was once someone’s inconveniently specific love story. Until, of course, the story gets summarized for easier scrolling.