Letter to the editor: Nomenclature key to telling truth about Canadian export

The Press Herald should stop using the phrase “oil sands” to refer to the product coming from the Athabasca tar sands deposits in Alberta. The phrase is nothing but deliberate oil industry PR.

Even the oil industry refers to it as “dilbit” or “dilute bitumen.” Bitumen is tar, plain and simple. What could be shipped through South Portland is tar sands.

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Please tell it like it is, rather than mouth industry propaganda. Our democracy can only survive with an independent, unbiased media. The choice of words, as James Thurber once said on another subject, is “minimization of the monstrous.”

Judith Hopkins

Pownal

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