Frisky

The aggressively bland language used by the TSA to describe these new policies — enhanced screening procedures, advanced imaging machines, enhanced pat-down — are classic bureaucratese, in which descriptions are seemingly engineered to minimize the meaning conveyed while maximizing the number of words used. (Classic examples of bureaucratese range from the benign, such as transportation project enhancements for flowers along the freeway, to the distressingly disengaged, such as man-caused disasters for terrorism.) Enhanced screening procedures raises more questions than it answers: Enhanced by what? For whom? And what, exactly, is being screened?

Because the TSA hasn’t been communicative, it’s fallen to stressed, disoriented, and embarrassed passengers to fill in the gaps with new vocabulary — sometimes with vocabulary much blunter than the TSA might wish for.

Critical terms for the whole airport screening process aren’t new: The checkpoints have been described for some years as security theater, a term coined by security expert Bruce Schneier in 2003 to describe procedures that serve more to create a feeling of increased safety than to reduce real risk. And critics have had fun with the agency itself, coining new “bacronyms” for its initials (TSA= “Thousands Standing Around”). But the combination of new technology and new intrusions on travelers’ personal space has accelerated the process.

Some of the new terminology is purely technical: The new scanners are not the familiar metal detectors, but what the TSA calls whole-body imagers that use either millimeter-wave or backscatter X-ray technology (another unfamiliar term: Traditional X-rays go through what is being X-rayed, but backscatter X-rays reflect off the surface). The resulting images can be very revealing, as one TSA employee found out after going through the new scanner only to be taunted by co-workers about the size of his genitalia. The images have led to a number of new nicknames for the scanners, including nude-o-scope, naked scanners, strip-search machines, and porno scanners. (It probably doesn’t help that the company that makes some of these machines is named Rapiscan.)