Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms

by Ralph Keyes

  Never Say “Die”

  When it comes to death, the euphemistic fog becomes nearly impenetrable. The dead are no longer with us. They left the building. Kicked the bucket. Bought the farm. They’ve gone home, or south, or west, or to the last roundup. They’ve laid down their burden. They’re pushing up daisies. Noting that the equivalent French expression manger les pissenlits par la racin literally means “eating dandelions by the root,” Hugh Rawson comments in his Dictionary of Euphemisms and Other Doublespeak, “It would be the French, of course, who would think of death in edible terms.”

  It wasn’t always so. When death was more routine, so were the words we used to discuss it. Imagine a marriage ceremony that included “Till a fatal event do us part.” Or a prayer that went, “If I should expire before I wake.”

  In the unsentimental Middle Ages, death was discussed freely, openly, candidly. Confronting death directly in word and spirit seemed to help our medieval ancestors cope with its prevalence. Works of art—paintings, statues, stained glass windows—brimmed with images of the dead and dying. Dancing skeletons were a common motif in the folk art of southern Europe (and still are in Mexico and other countries south of the U.S. border). Some early clocks were shaped like skulls to remind their owners that time was slipping away; death was on its way. Icons on tombstones didn’t gloss over what lay beneath them; they glorified it. A British church luminary named John Wakeman, who died in 1549, was buried beneath a monument adorned with a mouse, snakes, and snails feasting on his corpse. Well into the eighteenth century, skulls were the most common icon on New England gravestones.

  This willingness to face death squarely extended to language. One 1615 book for housewives discussed how to deal with “Child dead in the womb” and offered counsel for a woman who “by mischance have her child dead within her.” A comparison of the 1662 Church of England funeral liturgy with its revision in the year 2000 found revealing differences. In the 1662 version, reference was freely made to “the Grave,” “the Body,” and “the Corpse.” Three-hundred and thirty-eight years later, “the corpse” became the deceased. Prescribed proceedings three centuries ago included this biblical passage: “And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.” Its modern counterpart deleted those words. Typical of the newer liturgy was the passage “Like a flower we blossom and then wither: like a shadow we flee and never stay.” Guy Cook and Tony Walker, who compared the two versions, dryly noted “an absence of reference to the physical facts of death” in the contemporary Anglican funeral service, which they attributed to “an unwillingness to confront the physical nature of death.” In America too, as Gary Laderman notes in The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1779–1883, modern Protestant theology treats the physical remains of the dead as “persona non grata, so to speak.” Avoiding direct contact with dead bodies, Laderman concludes, “became a fundamental dimension of life and death in American culture during the twentieth century.”

  Before the twentieth century, death usually occurred at home, the dying person surrounded by relatives, friends, and neighbors, including children. Contact with dead bodies was commonplace. Decades after the fact, suffragist Frances Willard recalled being held aloft by her father when she was four (in 1843) so she could get a good look at the body of a next-door neighbor laid out in his Oberlin, Ohio, home. Following the advent of photography, pictures were taken of the dead as a remembrance for those left behind. For an event this ubiquitous, there was no need for flowery, evasive language. Folks died. They were dead. Their bodies were corpses.

  As recently as the mid-eighteenth century, there was little attempt to sanitize the language on tombstones. What could be simpler than this inscription on a Beverly, Massachusetts, tombstone:

  HERE LYES THE BODY OF Mr. John Blowers

  WHO DIED JULY Ye 13th 1748

  IN THE 38th YEAR OF HIS AGE

  Gradually, however, the words chiseled into granite began to change in concert with a shift in our attitudes toward death. For a time, the two concepts—approach and avoidance—coexisted, as can be seen in another Beverly tombstone inscription:

  In Memory of Mrs. LOIS BARRETT consort of Mr. THO BARRETT, who departed this life Sept 5th 1789, aged 29 years. Also Betsey their Daughter who died June 9th 1796, in the 7th year of her age.

  From infancy to riper years I grew

  Perhaps as certain of my life as you;

  But now in silent accents hear my cry,

  You soon like me within the Tomb shall lie.

  During the early nineteenth century, the words and icons on tombstones became more euphemistic. Now the dead had commenced rather than completed a journey. They passed over. They’d gone to a better place. They went home. Death was “God’s call,” the prominent clergyman Henry Ward Beecher assured antebellum Americans. “Come home.” Soothing words such as these were translated into optimistic inscriptions on tombstones accompanied by sculpted angels, cherubs, lambs, and urns with willow branches.

  As mortality declined and a sense of propriety rose, squeamishness about death created fertile ground for euphemizing. This shift could be seen in newspaper obituaries (a euphemistic name for what used to be called “death notices”), with their increased emphasis on evasive language. An analysis of obituaries in Irish newspapers during the 1840s found a steep decline in the use of words such as “die” and “death.” As for tombstone inscriptions, the new vocabulary clustered around themes such as embarking on a journey (gone to her eternal rest), entering a better world (abode of peace), taking a rest (from the labors of a well-spent life), and earning a reward (enjoyment of that peace and bliss that await the virtuous and the good).

  On both sides of the Atlantic, the concept of a “good death” emerged, one that took place in the presence of loved ones, the dying person confident of salvation, while murmuring a few memorable last words. Such deathbed scenes were featured prominently in Victorian literature. Death was being sentimentalized.

  In America, the Civil War interrupted this process. How good can a death be when it’s far from family, in the midst of horror and carnage, with no loved one present to record last words, even if any were murmured? No terms softer than “die” and “dead” had enough gravity to describe the nearly seven hundred thousand soldiers who died during this conflict, 2 percent of the entire population (equivalent to six million fatalities today). As Drew Gilpin Faust recounts in This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War, Yankees and Confederates alike became consumed with what they called a “harvest of death.” In this context, using euphemisms for dying would have seemed nearly obscene.

  Letters from the front to families of the dead relied on phrases such as “I was a witness to his death.” They assured parents that their son “was not afraid but willing to die.” Anticipating his own demise, one Confederate soldier who was mortally wounded during the battle of Gettysburg wrote his mother, “I died like a man.”

  Nurses did their best to fill in for mothers far away. Clara Barton carried a notebook in which she recorded the names of dying soldiers and any last words they might utter. A ballad at the time paid tribute to battlefield nurses like her:

  Bless the lips that kissed our darling

  As he lay upon his death bed,

  Far from home and ’mid cold strangers

  Blessings rest upon your head

  * * *

  O my darling! O our dead one!

  Though you died far, far away

  You had two kind lips to kiss you,

  As upon your bier you lay.

  Following the war, as Americans tried to put its horrors behind them, death-related euphemisms returned with a vengeance. Obituaries, once graphic in their descriptions of death and its causes, now reported that the deceased died of “short,” “protracted,” or “lingering” illnesses. Depictions of deathbed scenes that used to be common in such news accounts became a thing of the past. This was symptomatic, concluded Janice Hume in her book Obituaries
in American Culture, “of a society running away from death.” Our forced embrace of death during the Civil War prompted an unwillingness to even discuss the topic directly afterward. “Corpses” now were cadavers; “tombstones,” markers; “coffins,” caskets (adopting the name of jewel boxes). Nathaniel Hawthorne considered the latter “a vile modern phrase, which compels a person of sense and good taste to shrink more disgustfully than ever from the idea of being buried at all.” Richard Meade Bache, whose father, General George Meade, commanded Union forces at Gettysburg, seconded Hawthorne’s motion. “What trifling with a serious thing it is to call a coffin a casket!” wrote Bache.

  What would Bache and Hawthorne have made of the fact that by the turn of the century, undertakers had promoted themselves first to funeral directors, then to morticians (a term introduced in an 1895 issue of Embalmer’s Monthly), presumably because it sounded like “physician.” Throughout the twentieth century, members of the burgeoning funeral industry struggled to banish “death” and related words from their lexicon. The onetime “death certificate” was now a vital statistics form. Those who used to “die” now expired. They were deceased, not “dead.” Their remains weren’t “hauled” to funeral homes; they were transferred. The “hearses” used for this purpose became professional cars. Bodies that used to be “buried” during “funerals” were now interred during services.

  The most fertile ground for euphemizing is one where open discussion of a topic is taboo. So it was with sex in the Victorian era, and so it became with death thereafter. This topic was driven underground, as it were, becoming the great unspoken. Children who could easily hear sexual issues discussed in some detail on radio and television seldom heard the end of life discussed openly. In a society where death is treated as a taboo topic, observed Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969, “discussion of it is regarded as morbid.”

  Dying came to be seen as rather indecent, nearly obscene, and “death” akin to a four-letter word. Postwar advice books counseled parents to avoid talking about this subject with their children. A mid-twentieth century survey of 126 British parents found that nearly half—fifty-six—said they’d never discussed death with their offspring, and forty-two said they’d only done so euphemistically. Went to sleep became the most common euphemism for “died” when parents talked to their children about this subject. As a result, said one hospice social worker, not only did it not surprise her when children feared sleeping, but “it amazes me that children ever go to sleep at all.”

  Euphemisms are important bricks in the walls we’ve built to keep the dead from making us uncomfortable. Having done our best to avoid actual contact with the dying and dead, it would stand to reason that we’d replace associated expressions considered too stark and direct with soothing alternatives. Passed away is the most prevalent synonym for “died,” or simply passed. A writer in the New England Journal of Medicine went further, proposing that we call the dead nonliving persons. The British Medical Journal published a suggestion that bodies with organs eligible for transplant be called non-heart-beating donors. Those suggestions didn’t take, but doctors do still talk of losing vital signs and negative patient-care outcomes.

  Our discomfort with this topic is reflected in the sheer volume of alternative words for death and dying. Some are quite inventive. Linguist Louise Pound once compiled hundreds of death-related euphemisms such as counting daisy roots, left a vacant chair, and turned up his toes. Whimsically macabre versions included food for worms and crow bait. Some were unique to particular professions, as when butchers dropped off the hook, actors took one last curtain call (“curtains”), or reporters went 30, “30” being the numeral typed by journalists to indicate that they’d reached the end of their copy. Since Pound created her list, this process has continued. Boxers take the last count, gourmands lay down their knife and fork, gamblers cash in their chips, computer programmers go off-line.

  Growing interest in death and dying during recent decades, spearheaded by authors such as Elizabeth Kübler-Ross (On Death and Dying) and Sherwin Nuland (How We Die), suggests a greater willingness to face the topic squarely in print. This willingness is not reflected in everyday discourse, however. Collecting new death-related euphemisms such as taking a dirt nap, biting the biscuit, in the crisper, and reformatted keeps website proprietors busy. Oldies but goodies remain in constant use. When Barack Obama’s grandmother died on the eve of his election as president of the United States, Obama announced that “she has gone home.”

  With today’s trend toward nontraditional funerals, some involving green or woodland burials in natural cemeteries, a new euphemistic nomenclature of death is emerging. Bodies are buried in alternative containers; boxes or bags used instead of coffins. The increasing preference for cremation has led to inurnment of cremains. Online funerals are the latest development, attended by distant parties with the help of what some call “cremation cams.” Virtual cemeteries are another modern wrinkle, as are memorial websites and online grieving communities created by friends of the deceased. Funeral directors have had to step lively to keep pace with this rapidly changing scene, recasting themselves as funeral facilitators, grief facilitators, or memorial counselors who engage in memorialization activities.

  Another modern wrinkle is elaborate memorialization of dead pets by bereaved owners. Of course, the word “owners” is an offensive anachronism to animal rights advocates who propose guardians as a preferable designation for this group, and companion animals for what most still call “pets.” Many of these advocates are vegetarians who also think we should restore candor to the language surrounding edible animals by calling poultry, birds (“You gonna eat that bird?”), and meat, flesh (as in flesh eater). From this perspective, many of the words we use for meat are euphemistic, evasive terms relied on to distract us from what we’re actually putting in our mouths. Those who would have us dispense with soothing words for meat are rowing against the tide of history, of course. When it comes to food consumption, the trend is to euphemize more rather than less—especially the names of foods that make us a bit queasy.

  7

  Comestibles

  EVERY YEAR, AN “oyster fry” is held in Virginia City, Nevada. Why, you may wonder, does a landlocked town hundreds of miles from the closest oyster bed host this festival? Because sometimes an oyster is not really an oyster. In this case, it is the renowned Rocky Mountain Oyster, aka calves’ or lambs’ testicles, rolled in cornmeal and fried in sizzling oil.

  Rocky Mountain Oysters have been a western treat since America’s frontier days. The custom of eating them in a gala atmosphere lives on in numerous festivals that celebrate ranching traditions. Some requirements of that tradition are described in the introduction to an old Montana recipe for this delicacy:

  When the branding crew leaves in the morning to go brand calves, send along a clean bucket for collecting the R.M. Oysters as the bull calves are castrated. Also send instructions to cover them with cold water, and keep them in the shade. These instructions will probably be ignored unless you are taking lunch out to the branding crew, but it won’t really matter as the oysters will keep well until the crew returns.

  A 1905 cookbook I inherited from my South Dakota–raised grandmother includes a recipe for Fried Oysters that are clearly of the inland variety, although this is not spelled out. Oysters alone can be a euphemism for this frontier treat. Fries is another, for fried testicles, usually of lamb. Alternatively, the testicles of lamb or calves are sometimes called external kidneys.

  This artful renaming of testicles is part of a long tradition of euphemizing the names of foods that turn our stomachs or are considered taboo. As early anthropologists discovered, food rivaled sex as an inspiration for substitute words among the groups they studied. A century ago, Ivor H. N. Evans found that the Sakai people in what is now Thailand changed the names of animals when eating them because they believed such creatures had souls. Thus, when being consumed, a porcupine became the thorny one; a coconut monkey, no tail;
a mouse deer, big eyes.

  Culinary renaming practices vary from culture to culture, of course, and from epoch to epoch. Some contemporary consumers of meat don’t flinch at calling inner organs by their proper names. An Asian market I frequent sells intestine of pig as “pig’s intestines.” I’ve never found that cut of meat by this or any other name at my local Kroger’s, however. Nor does this supermarket sell tripe (stomach lining of various animals), which might have done better with a different name. Ditto for scrapple, the Pennsylvania Dutch staple made from pork trimmings and cornmeal mush. These products need to be sent back to the naming committee. Haggis, a Scottish favorite that consists of chopped inner organs of sheep combined with spices and filler such as oatmeal and suet baked in a lamb’s belly, has enjoyed somewhat more success. According to the Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy, “As a rule one does not attempt to make a haggis; one just buys a haggis and does not inquire too closely as to how it was made.”

  A WEE DROP

  For the past three decades, author Paul Dickson has conducted meticulous scholarship on synonyms for drinking and drunkenness. With the help of sources ranging from linguists to bartenders and emergency room personnel, Dickson compiled more than three thousand synonyms that he published in Drunk: The Definitive Drinker’s Dictionary (2009). Dickson calls this book “a celebration of the English language and its euphemistic splendor.” Its entries range from the mundane (tipsy) to the arcane (all geezed up) and the colorful (at peace with the floor).