Confused about the kerfuffle over the Pa. budget? That’s the point.

You can be forgiven for being confused about Pennsylvania’s budget.

Gov. Josh Shapiro and Senate Republicans have gone out of their way to use linguistic trickery that makes everything hard to understand.

The big sticking point — which gave Senate Republicans both heartburn and whiplash, as they first fell in love and then rapidly fell out of love with our Democratic governor — was school vouchers.

Not that you’re likely to hear anyone in government talking about “vouchers.” It seems everyone, led by Shapiro and Senate Republicans, preferred a continually shifting mélange of acronyms and euphemisms to avoid calling vouchers what they are.

As writing tools go, acronyms and euphemisms are top of the game for obscuring understanding. They’re exclusionary, as they omit meaning for everyone except those in the know.

Vouchers use state dollars to send kids to private schools (sometimes religious schools, sometimes schools with no better student outcomes than their neighboring public schools, always schools with no public accountability).

But so many discussions of the topic omit the word voucher. What did they say instead?

Doug Mastriano, whom Shapiro trounced in last year’s election, called this maneuver “school choice” — so for Shapiro, that moniker was off the table. Even if Shapiro was allying with Senate Republicans, he couldn’t be seen endorsing the same policy as the king of Pennsylvania MAGA.

» READ MORE: How the clash over school vouchers left the Pa. budget in a standstill

Shapiro and the Republicans instead pivoted to “Lifeline Scholarships,” a term that dates back at least to 2021, when State Rep. Clint Owlett introduced a bill establishing the “Lifeline Scholarship” program — the implication being, of course, that these vouchers will save lives. Shapiro even used the term on his campaign website (which has since been scrubbed of all policy positions). That’s also the preferred term of the right-wing Commonwealth Foundation, which has single-mindedly pursued vouchers as an education cure-all despite ample evidence that vouchers don’t improve test scores — and sometimes even lead to declining scores.

When Shapiro realized he couldn’t pick off any House Democrats to go along with his voucher deal with Senate Republicans, he decided to line-item veto vouchers from the budget bill that he’d advocated for. But what term did he use?

Maybe Shapiro and the Republicans got wise that “Lifeline Scholarships” implies that, if you’re sending a “lifeline” to certain kids, other kids are still stuck on a sinking ship, and you’re not doing anything to help them.

Whatever the reason, Shapiro’s news release announcing this veto didn’t refer to Lifeline Scholarships or school choice or vouchers. Instead, it cited “PASS Scholarships,” which stands for Pennsylvania Award for Student Success Scholarships … not that you’d know that explanation from reading the release, which never hints what PASS Scholarships are. To find that information, you’d have to dig into a legislative amendment from late June, where the newly renamed scholarships were buried in a bill about, uh, ambulance transportation services. You certainly won’t find any grand gubernatorial proclamation that school vouchers are actually Lifeline Scholarships which are now called PASS Scholarships. With each renaming, we got further from what the measure actually does.

This obfuscation isn’t accidental or coincidental.

This obfuscation isn’t accidental or coincidental. Spelling out all but the most common acronyms is standard journalistic practice (“avoid alphabet soup,” the Associated Press advises), so if they aren’t spelled out, there’s a reason. And “I want to avoid taking responsibility for this political hot potato” isn’t a good reason.

I suppose you could just call it bad writing. But even that would be a little, well, euphemistic.

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world, and appears biweekly. Send comments, questions, and Harvard commas to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.