The Camaro recall is due to an "issue," rather than a defect, it seems, at least in GM-speak.

What do you do when you’ve recalled more than 20 million vehicles worldwide in a matter of months, paid record fines and face the prospect of criminal charges for a decade-long delay in addressing a fatal ignition switch defect?

For one thing, stop talking about “defects” and “problems.” In the dictionary, according to General Motors , the faulty ignition switch at the root of the problem is a “condition” that “does not perform to design.”

Among the 100s of thousands of pages of GM documents that have come to light as part of the many investigations into the maker’s recall, one includes a list of 69 words and phrases engineers have been told they cannot use when discussing problems…er, conditions.

For her part, CEO Mary Barra likes to differentiate between “Old GM,” the company that went bankrupt in 2009, and the “New GM” that emerged with the help of a nearly $50 billion government rescue package.  It appears that one thing that survived the journey through Chapter 11 was the use of a thesaurus to find more palatable words to describe GM’s ongoing challenges – the maker so far this year recalling nearly 18 million vehicles in the U.S. alone.

(Six new recalls for GM include one for ignition shutoff problems involving 3.2 million vehicles. Click Here for the story.)

For example, in the Monday announcement of five more recalls, the largest due to the possibly 3.2 million vehicles could inadvertently shut off, the maker noted “The safety recall follows a review of ignition issues,” rather than defects.

Other seemingly appropriate words and phrases GM engineers have been told not to use are, “life-threatening,” ”dangerous,” “catastrophic,” and “explode.” Others probably would be a little extreme, such as:

• Deathtrap;
• Disemboweling;
• Grenade-like;
• Powder keg; and
• Widow-maker.

Oh, and don’t tell someone, “You’re toast,” if you drive in a “rolling sarcophagus,” GM has advised its engineers.

(GM recalls every Camaro built since 2010. Click Here for the full story.)

The automaker is by no means the only company that has its list of banned words, Ford using “thermal event” as a preferred alternative to saying that its 2008 Super Duty pickups might shoot flames out of their exhaust pipes.

“Sometimes, it’s to fight misperceptions, and in some cases it’s pet peeves, and in some cases it’s driven by lawyers,” Matt Friedman, a partner with Tanner Friedman, a Detroit firm focused on corporate image-building, told the Detroit Free Press.

(GM fires 15 for role in fatal ignition switch problem. Click Here for more.)

Linguists note that most humans are prone to searching for euphemisms when it comes to harsh language or unpleasant problems. Motorists are far more likely to have an “accident” than “crash” into one another, or have a “wreck.”

And perhaps nowhere is this more the case than in the highly litigious automotive world where every possible document or e-mail can show up in court. GM maintains a large legal army that reviews much of what the company does, especially documents that will or might see public light.  Describing something as a potential death-trap is far more likely to play into a plaintiff’s hands than a “condition” that simply “did not perform to design.”