As the name suggests, the point of a euphemism to substitute a more safe or decorous word for one too charged with anxiety or desire. Inevitably, every euphemism is a sort of figure of speech, a variety of allegory in the broader etymological sense of “saying something other” than what is meant. Thus euphemisms share with other figures the pleasure of wit and surprise that accompanies all such doublings as well as their semantic extension. The euphemistic expression does not merely occlude or replace the avoided one; it adds new elements of meaning as well, beginning with the charge of energy that accompanies entering a restricted zone of language or approaching taboos. Each example provides a model, often simple, of how poetic language in colloquial usage enriches and condenses meaning.
Euphemisms, like jokes, collect about nodes of human insecurity such as the divine, the ego, death, intoxication, sex, and scatology. Every euphemism by its very nature bears the nervous energy of treading in a no man’s land in inadequate disguise. Even empty sounds like “blankety-blank” or television’s bleep that masks improper language make all listeners ears prick up the with the conviction that what is being said must be of unusual interest. The visual cue of a series of symbols in a comic strip indicating profanity (called a grawlix [1]) draws attention to the utterance and intensifies it. The effect of substituting a harmless term for one in some way emotionally charged is, in fact, always paradoxical. While avoiding a tabooed usage the euphemism inevitably draws attention to the altered word, introducing a tone suggesting nervousness or a wink and a nod which in fact highlights the usage dramatically. [2]
The most ancient use of euphemisms may have arisen from wariness over using god’s name or the names of dead ancestors, or, indeed, one’s own name. The archaic identification of signifier and signified suggested that naming the supernatural might attract unwelcome attention from the divine and the deceased, unless strict ritual rules were observed. In many cultures a conjuring may be regarded as effective if the magician knows the name of person at whom a charm is directed.
The Cretan king Rhadamanthus was said to have forbidden swearing by the gods, mandating that people swear instead by animals. [3] To avoid exciting their unwanted attention, the chthonic deities governing vengeance retribution, the Erinyes (Furies) were called Eumenides (or the Benevolent Ones). They often were invoked in association with oath-taking, for they punished those who swore to a lie. Aeschylus tells in The Eumenides how they were tamed by Athena and called thereafter the Venerable Ones or Semnai.
Jews, Muslims, and Christians are well aware of the ancient Hebrew use of bynames to substitute for the deity’s name. Thus in the secular love poetry of the Song of Songs the repeated phrases by the roes, and by the hinds of the field are euphemistic forms of Hebrew oaths. God’s bynames are chosen with the greatest care. Phonically each resembles a conventional divine appellation. [4] Further, worship of animals (such as the golden calf) was common in the ancient Near East. One scholar at least thinks that these expressions are genuine pagan oaths to nature deities. [5]
The Orthodox today avoid writing or saying God’s proper name, the tetragrammaton, using a wide variety of euphemisms, most of which specify god’s nature, such as Almighty (El Shaddai) or Lord of Hosts (Adonai Tzva'ot, suggesting military leadership). At times they simply write G-d, a curious example of writing a word while simultaneously canceling it.
Of course, the most common euphemisms for God today, called minced oaths, arise from phonetic similarity and contribute no semantic information: gee, gosh, and the like. Even in the twenty-first century the magical belief that hearing oaths is somehow deleterious to children remains all but universal. Vestiges linger of the notion that women, too, must never hear such expressions.
The anxiety produced by thoughts of mortality is ameliorated sometimes by euphemisms expressing religious faith and the confident expectation of an afterlife: meeting one’s maker, to go to one’s reward. Some churches call funerals a homecoming. Other expressions by their levity represent a kind of whistling in the dark: kick the bucket, bite the dust, [6], buy the farm, and the like. Cockney rhyming slang is, as usual, more oblique, offering the mildly comforting brown bread for dead.
In modern times we associate euphemisms with sexual and excretory activities. A word directly naming the place we excrete (such as defecation room) almost never appears, nor does the term describing the apparatus most commonly used today, the water closet. Though today it may seem an unpleasant word because of its association, the word toilet was in origin a diminutive of toile and referred to a small cloth on which grooming tools were laid out. Powder room likewise suggests primping rather than peeing. [7] Similarly, latrine may bring to mind a reeking hole in the dirt, but it at first (like lavatory or, of course, washroom or bathroom) signified a place to clean oneself. Such terms reinforce the sense of purgation and purity that may follow excretion. In rest room the semantic element of relaxation following what might be called doing one’s business has become so generalized as to retain little force. Others, such as privy and the Spanish necessario, are even more oblique. More concrete are the associations of the British term bog referring at first to an open cess-pit.
The delicate education of children about reproductive activities may be simply called the facts of life, which washes the topic of social hazard, or the birds and the bees, suggesting the continuity of all life. Since France is considered sexually naughty, saying au naturel clothes nakedness in the discreet tones of another language while genteelly retaining its sauciness.
Vague words such as thing, stuff, or it and nonsense words can serve as general, all-purpose euphemisms. In a curious example of a euphemism recrossing into proscribed language a drug user who might refer to his stash as his shit, while an artist might use the same term to refer to his recent works. Presumably the high, whether aesthetically or chemically induced, is particularly charged for the junkie or the painter, both of whom are likely to be contemptuous of bourgeois standards. A bumper sticker reading stuff happens is understood as meaning shit happens, in which shit represents all possible undesirable events. Clara Bow was the It Girl whose film It appeared in 1927, and a teenager today might ask a friend, “Did you do it?” The 1928 song “Makin’ Whoopee” popularized by Eddie Cantor and “My Dingaling,” a hit for Chuck Berry in 1972 are examples of the use of neologisms to suggest sexual meanings, though they are not quite arbitrary. Whoopee with its insistent doubled vowels, certainly suggests the rush of joy that might accompany sex, while the jocular dingaling is comically associated with the dangling male genitalia.
The socially dangerous condition of intoxication is likewise hedged about by a rich growth of euphemism. Blasted and bombed acknowledge the destructive loss of function that accompanies drunkenness, while buzzed suggests the quickened hum in the inner ear associated with a lesser chemical alteration of consciousness. Cockneys nod ironically to high culture with Brahms and Liszt, which rhymes with pissed. Many other areas of life, money, for instance, disability, and aging, also attract euphemistic usages.
Steven Pinker coined the term euphemism treadmill [8] to describe the succession of terms that result when a once proper term has come to seem inadequate or offensive. Americans of a certain age saw the polite usage turn from colored to Negro, and then to black (sometimes Black), and finally African-American. Notoriously, terms like idiot, moron, and imbecile were once clinical terms designating degrees of cognitive limitation more scientifically (it seemed) than the generic feeble-minded of an earlier era only to be replaced in the middle of the twentieth century by retarded, then developmentally disabled. The DSM-5 uses intellectual disability. The hospital psychiatric department where my wife worked changed from Mental Health Unit to Behavioral Health Unit as though behavior defined the problem for depressive and psychotic alike. It must have sounded more polite to somebody.
In their most efficient uses, euphemisms have a spark of wit and a flowering of suggestive imagery. For instance, an American might tell a man whose trouser fly is unzipped, “Uh-oh, the barn door is open.” This form communicates the information while adding the amusement of a sort of riddle, the levity of humor, to defuse the topic’s awkwardness while retaining an implication of the power of Eros which, it suggests, is bestial and only in part controllable.
It may seem a rebuke to the pretentions of language itself that among the ancient Greek meanings of the word euphemism, along with the use of words of good omen and abstention from those of bad and praise-singing, is the solemn silence during religious rites, as though stillness might well displace our endless flow of verbiage. Euphemism, though, far from simply blocking verbal signification, heightens meaning and increases semantic precision, transmitting values and entertaining at the same time.
1. The term was coined by Beetle Bailey artist Mort Walker in 1964. They are also called jams and nittles. Such symbols had been used, however, at least since December 14, 1902 in Rudolf Dirks’ Katzenjammer Kids strip. In the grawlixes of sailors Uncle Heinle and John Silver, anchors are featured.
Walker named a number of other comic conventions as well in his book Lexicon of Comicana (1980). For instance, he called the visible cloud of dust generated by a character’s departure a briffit and plewds for the nimbus of sweat around an anxious character.
2. Words that do bear specific meanings may be eroded through vulgar usage to the same status or even less. With occasional use the word “fucking” may function as an intensifier, but in the discourse of a person whose every sentence includes several uses of the word even that is lost and the word, originally so potent, comes to mean nothing more than a pause during which “uh” escapes from the throat.
3. Porphyry, De Abstinentia III.16. For Porphyry this law suggests arguments in favor of vegetarianism. Divine animals and semi-bestial deities are, of course, common in archaic times. Rhadamanthus became proverbial for wisdom and later was described as one of the judges of the dead.
4. This occurs first in verses 2.7 and 3.5. The sound of the Hebrew for “roes” is similar to either (’elohey) ṣᵉba’ot '(God of) Hosts' or (YHWH) ṣᵉba’ot '(Jehovah is) Armies' and that for “hinds” to ’el šadday 'El Shaddai'. The association is explicit in the Targum.
5. See David McLain Carr’s “Rethinking Sex and Spirituality: The Song of Songs and Its Readings,” in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 81, No. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 1998), pp. 413-435.
6. This idiom, with its American Old West associations, is curiously similar to the Homeric expression that might be translated as “bite the earth.”
7. Pee itself is a euphemism to avoid saying piss.
8. “The Name of the Game,” in the New York Times for April 4, 2005.
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