Facility

 

It would be nice for a start to know what a Facility actually is (and I do not mean the “lavatory”!): is it something that facilitates something, as the name seems to imply? Something that makes something else easier to achieve? Is it the opposite of a difficulty? If only it were so simple! I am afraid that a Facility is something that hides and confuses more than it clarifies, closer to a fallacy than to a facilitation. This is probably done on purpose: see the EU’s EFSF (European Financial Stability Facility, a sad joke by all standards, including, among other unintelligible acronyms, the Loan Granting Facility and the Risk Management Financial Facility). This way of speaking without naming is usually called euphemism. When used on purpose by the cognoscenti, this hermetic way of expressing oneself is also referred to as “insider jargon”. The question I pose myself in this particular example is: Who is inside the insider-circle? Who is left outside in the rain? Did the Brits fool the rest of the EU into naming something after a euphemism? I wouldn’t put it past them, especially considering that they are not members of the Euro themselves. Or did the Chancellor of a certain Central European Super-Power who also invented other hollow euphemisms like “fiscal compact” overestimate her command of the English language with ridiculous consequences? I don’t know which possibility frightens me more. And what do other languages do with this gift (in the English meaning of the word, not the German one)? Their efforts are not acceptable: Germans have tried Fazilität, Spaniards have sometimes said facilidad. Both, of course, are highly unsatisfactory. Awaiting better suggestions, I remain puzzled. And that was just one instance of the mysterious use of the word facility. I’ll write another day about the, in some respects even more mysterious, Connecting Europe Facility, aka CEF.