Euphemisms can eventually become taboo words themselves through a process for which the linguist Steven Pinker has coined the term euphemism treadmill, which is comparable to Gresham's Law in economics. In this process, over the course of time, a word that was originally adopted as a euphemism acquires all the negative connotations of its referent, and has to be replaced by a substitute. In extreme cases, the process can happen many times, and indeed may still be happening. For example, "Toilet room", itself a euphemism, was replaced with "bathroom" and "water closet", which were replaced (respectively) with "rest room" and "W.C.". "Funeral director" replaced "mortician", which replaced "undertaker", which replaced "gravedigger". "Shell shock" was later replaced by "combat fatigue" and then "Post-traumatic stress disorder".
Connotations easily change over time. Idiot was once a neutral term, and moron a euphemism for it. Negative senses of a word tend to crowd out neutral ones, so the word retarded was pressed into service to replace moron. Now that too is considered rude, and a result, new terms like mentally challenged or special are starting to replace retarded. In a few decades, calling someone "special" may well be a grave insult. Similar progressions have occurred with
caretaker → janitor → custodian → plant manager, etc.
The English language contains numerous euphemisms related to dying, death, burial, and the people and places which deal with death.
Most commonly, one is not dying, rather, fading quickly because the end is near. Death is referred to as having passed away or departed. Sometimes the deceased (likewise a euphemism) is said to have gone to a better place.
There are many euphemisms for the dead body, some polite and some profane,or evensomewhat disrespectful as in "worm food",or "dead meat". The corpse was once referred to as the shroud (or house or tenement) of clay, and modern funerary workers use terms such as the loved one or the dearly departed. (They themselves have given up the euphemism funeral director for grief therapist, and hold arrangement conferences with relatives.) Among themselves, mortuary technicians often refer to a corpse as 'client'.
Contemporary euphemisms for death tend to be quite colorful, and someone who has died is said to have bit the big one, bought the farm, croaked, given up the ghost, kicked the bucket, gone south, shuffled off this mortal coil or to be pushing up daisies, taking a dirt nap, to provide but a few of the hundreds of expressions in use.
* * *
See if you can match the euphemisms on the left, which have been used in government and business, with the plain English versions on the right.
Mother tongue: Polish Joined: February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
RE: The "euphemism treadmill"
Meanwhile: Yours sincerely (if that's O.K. with you)
By C.J. Moore International Herald Tribune Wednesday, March 9, 2005
Suppose you lived in a world where there were two kinds of truth: a public truth, which everyone professed but nobody really believed, and a private truth, representing your real inner convictions which could never be said openly for fear of giving offense.
Put crudely like this, such a world could seem an Orwellian nightmare, recalling the last years of Soviet Russia with its dull conformity to discredited beliefs. But in practice, social and linguistic constructions of this kind are universal. Mostly, in our own societies, we take them for granted and don't question them. What we find differing between cultures, and even between social levels of a culture, is the degree of formality and importance given to these conventions.
At one extreme, in Japanese culture, the words tatamae and honne - often translated as appearance and reality - distinguish precisely two such "truths," one formal and public, the other unspoken and private. That such a distinction can actually be labeled tells us much about the formality of Japanese life and the corresponding difficulty for outsiders in reading what linguists call the "register" - the meaningful context for an utterance - and therefore in understanding what is really being said. Many a Western businessman must have left a meeting sure of a positive outcome, on the basis of the Japanese assurance "Zensho shimasu" (I will do my best). Unfortunately this phrase is just a polite way of saying no.
Similarly, when an English speaker begins a statement, "With the greatest respect ..." you can be sure the last thing in the speaker's mind is respect. ....
Sincerity, as Westerners understand it, takes the risk of offending for the sake of something greater or higher.
Robert Pirsig, in his philosophical novel "Lila," points out that the great allure of cowboy "Western" culture for America rests on the laconic "no-nonsense" style of speech far from the devious wordiness of East Coast sophisticates - who always, in the film versions, come a cropper. ...
Another time and another continent - the world of 17th-century France - brings to mind Alceste, Molière's all too honest character in "Le Misanthrope." Disgusted with the falsities of society, he overthrew convention and spoke his mind plainly whenever asked for an opinion. Among the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie where only appearances counted, such unfettered honesty provoked only alarm and chaos, leading to his self-banishment from a hypocritical world he could no longer tolerate.
But the last word, on barbed sincerity, must go to the English. "This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners," says Cecily, in Oscar Wilde's "Importance of Being Earnest." "When I see a spade, I call it a spade."
To which Gwendolen replies: "I am glad to say I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different."
Mother tongue: Polish Joined: February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
RE: The "euphemism treadmill"
A Linguist's Alternative History of 'Redskin'
Term Did Not Begin as Insult, Smithsonian Scholar Says; Activist Not So Sure
By Guy GugliottaWashington Post Staff Writer Monday, October 3, 2005; Page A03
[snip] For many Americans, both Indian and otherwise, the term "redskin" is a grotesque pejorative, a word that for centuries has been used to disparage and humiliate an entire people, but an exhaustive new study released today makes the case that it did not begin as an insult.
Smithsonian Institution senior linguist Ives Goddard spent seven months researching its history and concluded that "redskin" was first used by Native Americans in the 18th century to distinguish themselves from the white "other" encroaching on their lands and culture. ...
Goddard's view, however, does not impress Cheyenne-Muscogee writer Suzan Shown Harjo, lead plaintiff for Native American activists who, for the past 13 years, have sought to cancel trademarks covering the name and logo of the Washington Redskins.
"I'm very familiar with white men who uphold the judicious speech of white men," Harjo said in a telephone interview. "Europeans were not using high-minded language. [To them] we were only human when it came to territory, land cessions and whose side you were on."
Goddard, aware of the lawsuit and Harjo's arguments, said that "you could believe everything in my article" and still oppose current public usage of "redskin." ...
Harjo argues that pejorative use of "redskin" grew from the practice of offering bounties to anyone who killed Indians. ...
Mother tongue: Polish Joined: February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
RE: The "euphemism treadmill"
February 12, 2006
On Language
Tarnation Heck!
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
That unfortunate premature assessment, made to bolster morale at a stressful time, remains on the record of famous Bush statements like a piece of spinach on a toothy smile. Boosting what critics regarded as fecklessness, the remark will be recycled by his critics in gleeful derision for generations to come, like Calvin Coolidge's "The business of America is business" and Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook."
Language mavens, however, will focus on the president's repeated use of the euphemism heck. Revisiting the scene of Hurricane Katrina's devastation last month, he sought to help regenerate the New Orleans tourism industry by recommending the city as "a heck of a place to bring your family." The Washington Post editorially sniffed at the way he was "deploying the same infamous turn of phrase." The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Eugene Kane warned viewers of the State of the Union address, "If Bush uses 'darn' or 'heck' as an adjective to describe a person, place or thing, have a drink. If he uses heck or darn more than once. . .that means he's in his folksy mode."
We have a language anomaly here: the euphemism is taken to be offensive, while the harsh word being avoided — in Bush's case, and with apologies to the sensitive or reverent reader, hell — is presumably more acceptable. (…)
There was a time when hell was Hell, the place where you burned throughout eternity, and the religious connotation clung even as the word became a general intensifier. To take a conscious step away from giving offense to the religious, while preserving the adverbial emphasis, heck was adopted.
Darn — as in Bush's observation about the Muslim news media that "their propaganda machine was pretty darn intense" — was at the time of the American Revolution a less offensive way of saying damn. But Noah Webster reported in a 1789 dissertation that dern, pronounced "darn," "is now used as an adverb to qualify an adjective, as darn sweet; denoting a great degree of the quality." Damnation was serious stuff, but darn it and its variants dang it and dad-blast it were taken as secular, therefore milder, expressions of disappointment.
I ran my wonderment at the darned rise of heck-resentment past Prof. John Algeo, a philologist whose next book is "British or American English?" He recast my query in a salute to my penchant for alliteration: "Why, after all the louche language of the sinful seventies, evil eighties, and naughty nineties, is there a resurgence of decorous diction in this decade of the zealous zeroes?" Algeo's articulate and awesomely apt answer: "Could it be linked with the rise of the righteous Right?"
As lefties would say, damn right. The effusion of porn and profanity in movies and on the Internet, the weakening through repetition of copulation terminology on cable TV and the shrugging acceptance of the way excrement "happens" in every medium of communication caused a vocabulary backlash. Political figures recognize this and bend the language of emphatic imprecation over backward, ostentatiously refusing to let even such long-tamed terms as hell and damn escape their lips in public.
"Keep in mind that the original words, particularly religious profanity, were once considered extremely strong," notes Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary. "People who now use the euphemistic alterations are more folksy, likely to be older, more rural or conservative, so the words suggest an older and less urban worldview. Speakers who are younger, urban and nonconservative would use the uneuphemized words, or even stronger words." (…)
....Countless news articles and blog entries over the past two and a half years have claimed that "transfer tube" is the new Pentagon-speak for "body bag." Sometimes, as in Tom Tomorrow's political cartoon This Modern World, the purported euphemism is rendered as "transport tube." (As one of his glassy-eyed characters put it: " 'Body bag' is such an uncouth term!") But the U.S. military does not refer to body bags as either "transfer tubes" or "transport tubes." Mortuary suppliers have been using the designation "pouch, human remains" since at least 1965, and the Pentagon has recognized "human remains pouch" (or HRP for short) as the official term since the first Gulf War.
The Ottawa Citizen recently labeled the transfer tube story an "urban legend." Unlike most urban legends, however, this spurious bit of accepted wisdom can be traced back to one incident: Not a vicious rumor intended to tar the Bush administration, but a simple misunderstanding between a reporter and a military spokesman. ...
Mother tongue: Polish Joined: February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
RE: The "euphemism treadmill"
Slate's Euphemism Contest
Announcing the winner—and a new contest.
Click here* to play or download Slate's latest euphemisms audio contest, featuring Atlantic Monthly language columnist Barbara Wallraff.
Back in July, we invitedSlate readers and podcast listeners to write in and suggest the best euphemisms for stupidity. Hundreds of you did, and your responses clearly demonstrated that our audience is anything but … a few fries short of a Happy Meal.
In today's podcast (which you can also play right from your computer by clicking here), our contest curator, Barbara Wallraff, recounts many of her favorite entries. They include international euphemisms—listen for the brilliant one from Canada—and one you'll need to write down to understand. Then Barbara crowns what she considers the very best euphemism for stupid.
At the end of the show, we throw out a new challenge. This time, Barbara is looking for the all-time best corporate euphemism. We strongly recommend you listen to the program for more details before entering, but here are the entry details:
* If clicking on the link doesn't start the audio playing on your system, or if you prefer to download it, try right-clicking (Windows) or holding down the Control key while you click (Mac), and then "save" or "download" the audio file to your hard drive. http://www.slate.com/id/2147961/
Mother tongue: Polish Joined: February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
RE: The "euphemism treadmill"
It's winter solstice, if you know what I mean.
Euphemisms for … Sex
Plus, help us find the best way to say drunk.
Click here* to play or download Slate's latest euphemisms audio contest, featuring language columnist Barbara Wallraff.
There is quite probably no topic better suited to euphemism than, as it were, "playing cars and garages."
In fact, it's been noted that almost any phrase can be made to sound like a reference to sex, simply by adding the nudge-nudge clause "if you know what I mean."
Example: "Did you butter that bread, if you know what I mean?"
But last month, when we threw the challenge out to our readers to find the best euphemism for sex, they responded with some remarkably funny and apropos turns of phrase, many drawn from their own lives. You can hear the story behind terms like "waxing the giraffe," and find out what euphemism was judged the very best by contest curator Barbara Wallraff, by clicking here. *
You don't need an iPod or other portable audio device to hear the program—you can play it right from your computer.
The program also contains the details of our next euphemism contest. In this one, we're looking for your favorite ways to describe the state many of us will find ourselves in on New Year's Eve. That is, we want the best euphemism for drunk: http://www.slate.com/id/2156021/pagenum/all
A few hundred years ago, teasing was anything but taboo. Jesters and fools enjoyed high status. With their sharp-tongued mockery, outlandish garb and entertaining pranks, they highlighted the absurdities of all that was held sacred, from newborns and newlyweds to kings, queens and leaders of the church. In the tradition of the jester or the fool lies the essence of what a tease is — a playfully provocative mode of commentary.
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