Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms

by Ralph Keyes

  In an eye-opening study, linguist Muriel Schulz explored the carousel ride of words that refer to women. A striking number morphed from innocent to dubious to downright derogatory. Early on, “nymphet” referred simply to an attractive young woman. So did “broad.” “Hussy” evolved from huswif (“housewife”) in Old English. But the trajectory of women-specific words Schulz analyzed wasn’t always downhill. Some were rehabilitated. Before retrieving its good reputation, wife had become a euphemism for “mistress” in the Middle Ages; niece for the illegitimate daughter of a priest. Girl at one time referred euphemistically to prostitutes. So did cat. (Think cathouse.)

  Like courtesans who become society matrons, tainted euphemisms can regain their respectability over time. It’s not at all uncommon for terms once considered vulgar or risqué to lose their stigma. “Poke,” a sometime synonym for “fuck,” today is a cute term for contacting someone online or for giving a patient an injection (“a little poke”). “Bloody”—once the most offensive of words in Britain—is today a relatively innocuous piece of verbal punctuation. “Blast” was once considered so blasphemous that English schoolchildren were punished for uttering this word. In 1869, a linguist warned that the term “ornery” is “shocking and should never pass the lips of any one.” As that onetime synonym for “lewd” began to be used semiaffectionately (“he’s an ornery cuss”), it lost its shock value in the same way that “bastard” went from being pure profanity to an occasional term of affection (“You old bastard, you!”).

  This is typical of the carousel whirl in which words are both soiled and cleansed. Even as some euphemisms go mainstream, others are contaminated by association with the topic they refer to and become just as dubious as the word they replaced. They’re fallen euphemisms. The classic example is fart, a medieval euphemism that over time took on the odor of the act it referred to and itself became offensive. Similarly, retarded was originally a polite way to describe those more rudely called “idiots,” “imbeciles,” or “morons.” Today, the word “retarded” is considered so insulting that there is a movement to ban its use.

  In a related process, respectable terms that are requisitioned as euphemisms can quickly lose their respectability. Cicero complained that when “penis” became a euphemism for the male sex organ, it could no longer be used to refer to animals’ tails. During Cicero’s time, Roman youth used deliciae as a playful euphemism for sex (it essentially means “a diversion” or “pleasure”). After taking on sexual connotations, however, deliciae itself became taboo. Some centuries later, when “occupy” became a euphemism for lovemaking during the late Middle Ages, that term could no longer be used in polite conversation. A similar fate befell “intercourse,” which originally simply meant “to communicate” before it was commandeered as a polite synonym for copulation (to the chagrin of residents of Intercourse, Pennsylvania). “Hook up” used to mean little more than connecting with someone. Today it can mean so very much more.

  This is a constant problem with euphemisms. Using them can be like trying to conceal the naked body of an actress beneath a gossamer gown. Euphemizing represents a forlorn hope that renaming something might change its essence. Negative connotations are not in taboo words themselves, however, but in what they refer to. As a result, euphemisms can only protect our sensibilities for so long.

  Consider how we deal verbally with the sensitive topic of insanity. Here, terms that start out as euphemisms invariably end up as affronts. This leads to a constant verbal turnover. In their definitive books Euphemism and Dysphemism and Forbidden Words, Australian linguists Keith Allan and Kate Burridge have explored this verbal degeneration in some detail. The term lunatic was initially a euphemistic reference to a form of mental illness associated with changing lunar phases. Touched originally suggested that a demented person had been touched by God’s hand. At one time, deranged simply meant “disordered” or “disturbed” before it took on more ominous connotations as a euphemism for “mad.” Crazy derived from the more benign term “crazed,” which meant “flawed” or “cracked.” Cracked itself is an enduring synonym for “mentally ill,” though not one we’d now consider polite. Today, we turn to psychology for neutral descriptors such as syndrome and disorder. How long such terms will stay respectable is anyone’s guess.

  In a gruesome illustration of euphemism degradation, concentration camp—a term initially used by the British as an innocuous name for internment centers they created during the Boer War—became sinister due to the hideous reality of what took place in Nazi death camps that also used this name. Several decades later, when reporters said tens of thousands of interned Tamils were in concentration camps, Sri Lankan authorities took offense. They insisted that these were actually welfare camps.

  The Euphemism Cookbook

  As we’ll see throughout this book, euphemisms are created in a wide variety of ways. The most common way is to simply substitute an acceptable word for one that’s considered unacceptable. (Sugar! Fudge!) Sometimes these substitute words are invented ones that sound similar to the verboten term. (Shucks! Fooey!) In the process, we often assign harmless little words to stand in for charged ones. Do, for example, is commonly used as a synonym for “fuck,” “kill,” “defecate,” and other questionable acts.

  In some cases, the word substituted comes from another language, carrying scant odor of taboo. When Americans are not sure if it would be a good idea to say “balls” aloud, they can always resort to the Spanish cojones and often do. Soixante-neuf is a double-duty euphemism, one relying on both French and numbers to refer to mutual cunnilingus and fellatio. (Those willing to forgo the added cover of French simply say “sixty-nine.”) “Cunnilingus” and “fellatio” themselves have a Latin root. Latin has done a lot of euphemistic heavy lifting over the millennia. Think “phallus,” “pudenda,” “areola,” “testes,” “coitus,” and so many more. College students in medieval Europe were advised to use Latin words instead of ones in the vernacular that might be considered profane. Modern sex educators use as many Latin terms as possible to avoid embarrassment when discussing body parts. In an account popular in England some decades ago, a British soldier who had been shot in the buttocks during World War I was asked by a woman visiting his hospital ward where he was wounded. The soldier responded, “I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t say. I never studied Latin.”

  Professional jargon, much of it Latin based, is another primary source of euphemisms that rely on the “blind them with science” approach. Thus, prophylactic for “condom,” localized capacity deficiencies for “traffic bottlenecks,” seismic activity for “an earthquake.” When it comes to ostentatious, euphemism-loaded speech, many believe the more syllables, the better. The near-meltdown of the nuclear plant at Three Mile Island was initially called an unscheduled energetic disassembly. An airline’s annual report referred to a crash of one of its planes as an involuntary conversion. In the auto industry, a car crash is called rapid or sudden deceleration. This sometimes results in a thermal event (i.e., a fire). “Event” is an invaluably ambiguous word when it comes to euphemizing. What most of us think of as “hand washing,” hospital administrators call a hand hygiene event.

  Other euphemistic discourse goes in the opposite direction. Particularly in the areas of sex, body parts, and bodily functions, small is beautiful: poo, pee, do, it. Linguist Robin Lakoff illustrates the difference between these approaches by comparing the words of a doctor who says, “Copulation may also be enhanced by the use of oleaginous materials,” with a terser way of saying the same thing, “Selma told me she found Jimmy and Marion doing it with mayonnaise!”

  Words such as “it” more than earn their keep when euphemisms are needed, as when sexy Clara Bow was called “the it girl.” Other unusually useful euphemistic terms include certain (“a woman of a certain age”), interesting (“she’s in an interesting condition”), and, especially, special (special assistant, special needs, Special Forces). As R. W. Holder writes in How Not to Say What You Mean, “sp
ecial” is a word that “makes the ears of a collector of euphemisms prick up.”

  Requisitioning proper names is a common euphemizing tactic and has been for eons, though the names themselves vary with time and place. When “Jock” was a more common moniker, it got pressed into service as a synonym for “penis” (leaving an echo behind in “jock strap”). After “Jock” developed dubious connotations, another common form of euphemizing was employed: substituting a single letter in an offending word to convert it into one that’s inoffensive. Thus, the football fans’ cry “Knock their jocks off!” gave way to “Knock their socks off!”

  The least imaginative way to create euphemisms is by simply replacing one or more letters in a word with punctuation marks: “g-dd- -n!” “The h-ll you say!” “You c.cks.cker.” “F**k you!” Because this approach calls undue attention to the deleted letters, it’s rather self-defeating. As a Florida judge once observed in a censorship case, “ ‘f…… pigs’ is unlikely to be seen as referring to police officers who are ‘foolish,’ ‘fawning,’ ‘finicky,’ ‘flaccid,’ ‘foppish,’ ‘frantic,’ ‘fretful,’ or ‘fascist.’ ”

  The Victorian era was the heyday of typographical euphemisms. During that prudish time, first letters followed by dashes or asterisks replaced many a word deemed suspect. Somerset Maugham called Victorian England a setting in which “asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.” Well into the twentieth century, the upright Malcolm Muggeridge referred to members of his generation as “asterisk men.” And it wasn’t just English authors who self-censored this way. Their American counterparts also felt a need to engage in prudent euphemistic punctuation. In his 1883 novella In the Carquinez Woods, even down-to-earth Bret Harte portrayed a priest who confesses, “When I have often wrestled with the spirit I confess I have sometimes said, ‘D—n you.’ Yes, sir, ‘D—n you.’ ”

  Going beyond mere punctuation as a source of all-purpose euphemisms, we’ve put “bleep” to use in the same way. (“Bleep you!”) Expletive is another euphemism that often comes in handy. (“Expletive deleted.”) Other multipurpose euphemistic words include blankety-blank, doo-dah, thingamajig, thingy, whatsit, whatnot, and you-know-what. According to ABC News, disgraced financier Bernard Madoff said he “didn’t give a blank” about his sons (who had turned him in to the authorities for running a Ponzi scheme).

  Clipping words fore and aft is another euphemistic strategy. “Whipped” is one such word, clipped from the vulgar “pussywhipped,” which is a more vivid way to say “henpecked.” “Bull” is a reasonably respectable clip of “bullshit,” and “mother” used in a proper tone of voice can pass muster in a way that its root—“motherfucker”—could not. During the brief period when George Wallace’s wife, Lurleen, stood in for him as governor of Alabama, bumper stickers appeared that read GOVERNOR WALLACE IS A MOTHER. After examining this sticker on the bumper of a car in Detroit, a group of street toughs approached its owner.

  “Hey, man,” said one.

  “Yes?”

  Pointing at the bumper, “That’s only half a word.”

  Acronyms and abbreviations are forms of euphemism that have gained popularity over time. The A that New England Puritans made adulterous women sew on their clothing and that colonial Pennsylvanians branded on the foreheads of third-time adulterers might be seen as a precursor. Leprosy, which was initially euphemized with the eponym Hansen’s disease (after Dr. G. H. A. Hansen, who discovered its underlying cause), later became simply HD. Abbreviations and acronyms gained popularity in America’s New Deal era, then really took off during World War II and its aftermath. They were ideally suited to the postwar euphemistic sensibility: sterile, vague, easy to create and manipulate. The pharmaceutical ads so common on television today are like a glossary of euphemistic initials: not just ED (erectile dysfunction) and PMS (premenstrual syndrome) but COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), and GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease), to name just a few. Your over-the-counter drug is their OTC. Initializing this way is a spreading source of euphemism, one that makes our language pithier but poorer.

  THE SCUNTHORPE PROBLEM

  Victorian euphemizing strategies are alive and well on the Internet. There, content filters do the work that used to be left to human censors, only with no sense of nuance. “Hello” gets changed to hecko online, “class” to cl***, “wish it” to wi** **. A filter that replaces “nigga” with nubian revised “niggardly” to read nubianrdly.

  This is known as the Scunthorpe problem, so called because an early content filter used by AOL prevented residents of Scunthorpe, England, from registering accounts due to the second, third, fourth, and fifth letters of their town’s name. Those living in Penistone, Sussex, and Lightwater faced similar problems (in the latter, “twat” being a no-no). For that very reason “saltwater taffy” showed up in one online forum euphemized as “salfemale genitaliaer taffy.”

  Auto-replace has been problematic when put to work on behalf of particular agendas. In the most celebrated example, a Christian website whose filter automatically converted the word “gay” to “homosexual” ran an Associated Press article about sprinter Tyson Gay. The article began, “Tyson Homosexual was a blur in blue, sprinting 100 meters faster than anyone ever has.”

  In the realm of cyber-Bowdlerizing, miscontruable names are especially vexing to those who have them, as men named Dick sometimes discover when searching their name on the Internet and encountering D*ck. Due to the magic of automatic euphemizing, George W. Bush’s vice president is sometimes mentioned online as thingy Cheney. In chat rooms that proscribe “shat,” the actor William Shatner has been discussed as William S***ner.

  Spam filters pose particular problems to those whose names trip warning signals. E-mails from anyone named Lipshitz are at constant risk of being blocked, as are ones sent by anyone named Cockburn. (Craig Cockburn of Scotland solved that problem by writing his name with a zero instead of an o: C0ckburn.) The word “cock” alone is sometimes changed to **** online. In that regimen, gun hammers are ****ed, human beings **** their heads, and forum participants debate the moral quandary of ****fights.

  It’s as if we subcontracted the job of euphemizing taboo words to HAL the computer in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Only HAL was more nuanced.) What is to be done? Users are not without options. To work around ham-handed cyber prudery, when discussing a manuscript, members of one chat room began writing m****cript. Other site hosts make a game out of foiling filters, reprogramming their own to translate “bitch” into “gluestick,” say, or “shit” into “cheese.” The reprogrammed filter of one online forum automatically changes “fuck” to “gently caress” (“Gently caress you!”). Another alters any mention of “hell” to read “New Jersey.” A third changes all questionable words to “Melanie Griffith.” What have they got against Melanie Griffith?

  Roll Your Own

  When interviewing lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower on National Public Radio about his book The F-Word, Robert Siegel substituted the word “floss” for “fuck” (sparking protest from listeners who asked him to consider the implications of this euphemism for dentists, to say nothing of fastidious flossers). In a similar gambit, the New Yorker’s Tad Friend replaced every word referring to intimate body parts in an obscenity-filled routine by a Canadian comedian with “Wayne Gretzky” (e.g., pointing to his mother and wife in the audience, saying, “There’s the Wayne Gretzky I come from, and there’s the Wayne Gretzky I go home to”). Malcolm Muggeridge used the same approach when reviewing Eros Denied: Sex in Western Society by Wayland Young. In place of what he called “the verb which occurs on almost every page,” Muggeridge substituted Young’s first name (“he Waylanded her good and proper”). His review was titled “W**l*nd*ng.”

  Think of this as roll-your-own euphemisms. Here is where we see the creativity of euphemism invention in its purest form. To give their children euphemistic words for ticklish body parts, some parents create thei
r own. When a young girl asked her father what that thing was dangling between his legs as he got out of the bath, he told her it was his handy gadget. Well into adulthood, she used handy gadget as a euphemism for “penis.” The mother of a friend of mine advised her children that this organ was a jingle bell. Another told her sons to call it their link a link. “My mother called mine a ‘sisser,’ ” reports a Floridian about her vagina (conceivably because cicer was a synonym for “penis” used by Juvenal). “My mom used to call it a ‘fuzzy peach,’ ” says another American woman. “My mum always used to call it your ‘nooks and crannies,’ ” chimes in an Englishwoman.

  As for what emerges from such body parts, those who aren’t content to fall back on the standard wee-wee, doo-doo, and pass gas get imaginative. Tushie music is what a family in Los Angeles called flatulence. Another dubbed the crackling version frying eggs. Every family has its own terms for calls of nature. Some refer to it as biz overall. Excrement might be happy toads, the act of creating them a big job (as opposed to the little job of urinating). In one family, defecating was called big business; urinating, wets (as in “Dad, Dad, pull over! I’ve gotta go.” / “Wets or big business?”). Since number one and number two are such sterile euphemisms for urine and feces, a mathematician threw in a bit of education by providing his children with the square root of one and the square root of four.

  If the most common reason to euphemize is as a flight to comfort, less appreciated is the fun one can have when doing so. As linguists Keith Allan and Kate Burridge observe, “The importance of language play among human beings has been generally ignored.” In Forbidden Words, Allan and Burridge call attention to how many substitute words—especially in the area of sex and excretion—“show remarkable inventiveness of either figure or form; and some are indubitably playful.”