Fun With Euphemisms

So I've been getting some rejection notices lately– and, by the way, the courtesy of a rejection notice still makes me almost unreasonably happy to get one, even if I've already realized I'm not getting cast– and the more I read rejection notices, the more I start to recognize some standard language. And the more I read that standard language, the more it sounds like someone wrote a polite English rejection letter, Google-translated it into Japanese, Google-translated the Japanese into French, and then finally clicked the garbled French back to English and then cut and pasted that into an email and merrily clicked Send.

My current favorite example: "We have decided to go in a different direction for this role." It makes me think that, originally, the breakdown had called for a female, 22-27, but some eighty year old man walked in to the audition room and TOTALLY NAILED IT, and they're just making some tweaks to the script to accommodate him. Or, conversely, "We saw your audition for this role, and it caused us to seriously re-evaluate what we were doing, and the life decisions that we had made that led us to this point, so much so that now we've got to change course immediately."

I mean, I understand the idea of sparing someone's feelings, which I think is behind this 'It's-not-you-it's-us' rationale. "We decided that you are absolutely terrible, hopelessly terrible, and we hope that you did not quit your day job, because HOO BOY," would be an awful rejection letter (although if I were to receive it, I might still print it out and frame it). But the "decision to go in a different direction" feels like a yogi-level stretch to avoid saying "we are unable to offer you a role." Which is not such a horrible thing to say that we need to euphemize it. Unlike, say:

DOCTOR: Well, ma'am, your husband's heart was beating, but then it decided to go in a different direction. . .