Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms

by Ralph Keyes

  Paul Dickson is just the latest author to collect words we substitute for liquor, drinking, and drunkenness. Examining these words has fascinated predecessors ranging from Chaucer to H. L. Mencken. On the Internet, the creator of a website called the Drunktionary posted more than five thousand synonyms for drunkenness, then watched this number grow with reader contributions.

  Such lists brim with euphemisms. In its most basic form, liquor becomes a mere beverage. With elaborate decorum, drinkers lift an elbow to down a libation, some spirits, or schnapps. They have an eye-opener to start the day and a nightcap to end it. In between, they might enjoy a pick-me-up, a nip, a little snort, a wee drop, a restorative, or—in a pinch—some cough medicine.

  Such euphemistic talk camouflages what is still seen by many as a shady activity, one that too often leads to—ahem—inebriation. At best, having a glow on; at worst, smashed. Under the table. Schnozzled. Pie-eyed. Stewed to the gills.

  Mencken noted how much more common, and colorful, drink talk is in the United States than in the United Kingdom, a fact acknowledged by a British reviewer of Mencken’s The American Language, who envied such Americanisms as piffled, tanked, slopped, snooted, het-up, and frazzled. One problem confronting those who write about this topic in Great Britain is the fact that its strict libel laws don’t necessarily consider accuracy an acceptable defense. A British politician once won a substantial settlement from a journalist who’d called him “drunk” in print, even though this was apparently true. Had the reporter taken refuge in press dodges such as outgoing, ruddy-faced, or tired and emotional, he could have saved himself, and his employer, a lot of money.

  Paul Dickson points to the ridiculousness of those who drink too much as a powerful motivator for creating camouflage words. “Drinkers and those who fuel them feel more comfortable euphemizing their condition,” he writes. “Better to say that one was ‘a little squiffy’ last night than to admit intoxication.”

  And what of the plaintive morning after? Being hung over has its own euphemistic glossary: flulike symptoms, say, or under the weather. At one time, this condition was called a Dutch headache. Global euphemisms for a hangover collected by essayist Joan Acocella include hair ache (French), carpenters in the forehead (Danish), and made of rubber (Salvadorans). Acocella found many ways to say “hangover” in Ukrainian, but few in Hebrew.

  During Prohibition, there was widespread concern that the colorful euphemisms surrounding drinking might disappear. A 1916 article in the Sunday Oregonian fretted that “Hereafter Only Prunes will be ‘Stewed.’ ” If anything, the opposite was true. According to Paul Dickson, the period from 1920 to 1933 when liquor sales were illegal constituted a “Golden Age” of euphemistic talk about drinking. In one 1922 U.S. District Court case, a lawyer asked a witness if he’d been “keyed up.” The witness responded that he’d been “pretty well organized” and “about soused.” The judge then had his say: “All these countless slang expressions will not be tolerated in this court. If the man is drunk, all right. I do not know the legal meanings of ‘soused’ and ‘keyed up,’ ‘organized,’ ‘polluted’ and expressions of a like nature, but I do know what ‘drunk’ means. A man is drunk who is not his normal self, under the influence of liquor.”

  The lawyer then asked his witness if he’d been drunk. “Yes,” the witness replied, “Yes.”

  Gastronomic Red Herrings

  Which foods are considered tasty and which ones repulsive depends on who you are, where you are, and when. Without flinching or euphemizing, ancient Romans ate all manner of food that we shun today. One of the earliest known cookbooks, two millennia old, included Roman recipes for pig’s paunch, cock’s testicles, capon’s kidneys, hare’s liver, and sheep’s lungs, as well as flamingo, parrot, cuttlefish, tooth fish, horned fish, conger eel, stuffed dormouse, and fish-liver pudding. Roman gourmands were also quite fond of sow’s vulva. Like contemporary Americans, Romans would not eat horse meat.

  Culture dictates food taboos. There is nothing inherently wrong with eating any digestible food; only what society tells us is wrong. Westerners are as horrified by the idea of eating dogs, as Indians are by our custom of consuming cows. The horse meat that Americans shun is a staple of French cuisine. My wife’s grandmother, raised with rural Ukrainian eating customs, considered lettuce “pig food.” What’s considered yummy in one society can be seen as yucky in another, and our naming practices fall in step. Pig-eating English speakers call this animal’s flesh “pork.” Those who consider that meat impure say it comes from “swine.”

  Why certain foods are taboo in some cultures but not in others is the source of much debate. Why do so many of the world’s people gladly eat rat meat, but we don’t? Where does the love of blood sausage in some cultures and the revulsion for that dish in others come from? Does the name alone keep many people from eating oxtail? No one is quite sure. For our purposes, let’s focus on the simple fact that certain foods are prime candidates for renaming in cultures that find them off-putting. Westerners are more likely to eat seaweed at a Japanese restaurant when it’s called a sea vegetable. The lowly crayfish sells better as a lordly rock lobster. American soldiers are happier when served chicken Francesca than when chicken and gravy is on their menu.

  The results are what Keith Allan and Kate Burridge call gastronomic red herrings, euphemistic names intended to distract us from what we’re actually eating. Even the innocuous term “giblets” helps conceal the fact that it’s the inner organs of poultry that we’re cooking. Some starving Europeans who ate cats during World War II called them country rabbits. Poverty-stricken Americans who took to eating armadillo during the Depression sarcastically called it Hoover hog. A few decades earlier, Americans who were sick of eating dried beans took to calling them Alaska Strawberries.

  Fooling around with the names of food is a long-standing practice that’s tightly tied to both taste and taboo. Because food taboos are so focused on meat, euphemizing kicks in to high gear when it comes to naming animals and parts of animals considered edible. In that regard, we’re not much different from Thailand’s Sakai who would eat the flesh of animals they’d killed only after renaming it. Like them, we don’t eat cows but do eat beef. Not calves but veal. Not deer but venison. Not pig but pork. Not sheep but mutton. (Lamb, surprisingly, seems to have escaped this renaming process.)

  One needn’t be a vegetarian to conclude that manipulating the words we use for animal flesh may reflect our ambivalence about eating once-living creatures. It’s not just cuts of meat that are euphemized but also the way they’re retrieved from the animals we used to “slaughter” but now process. As a Costco spokesman reminds us, “converting live animals into food is not a pleasant task.”

  Modern culinary euphemisms reflect squeamishness about food preparation, especially when animal flesh is involved. It wasn’t always so. Before the late-nineteenth century, animals were routinely slaughtered at home. Until then, an ability to butcher meat was one of the domestic arts. An English cookbook advised seventeenth-century English housewives that “in all manner of meat except a shoulder of mutton, you shall crush and break the bones well; from pigs and rabbits you shall cut off the feet before you spit them, and the heads when you serve them to table.” Victorian women who might have swooned after watching five minutes of Sex and the City didn’t flinch when Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management told them to prepare the main ingredient of Turtle Soup thusly:

  Cut off the head of the turtle the preceding day. In the morning open the turtle by leaning heavily on the shell of the animal’s back, whilst you cut this off all round. Turn it upright on its end, that all the water, &c. may run out, when the flesh should be cut off along the spine, with the knife sloping towards the bones, for fear of touching the gall.

  Now we’re getting into sticky territory. Once we delve too far inside the corpses of edible animals, naming their organs becomes problematic. Ever since thymus glands were dubbed sweetbreads by some clever cook, the practice of renaming
dubious cuts of meat has generated unusually imaginative euphemisms. (According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of “sweetbread” was in a 1565 animal thesaurus that referred to “the sweete breade in a hogge.”)

  Renaming inner organs became a pressing concern during World War II when so much of the outer flesh of slaughtered animals was reserved for men and women in uniform. Left for those at home were the entrails: livers, kidneys, brains, lungs, intestines, stomachs, testicles, and hearts that few Americans wanted to eat. Making matters worse were the names they were given: organ meats, inside meats, and offal, which includes appendages such as tails and feet and sounds a lot like “awful.” Who wants to eat that? Historic British alternatives such as “humbles” and “nasty bits” were no improvement.

  In order to keep their protein consumption up, Americans on the home front needed to be encouraged to eat more inner organs of animals. The government therefore convened a distinguished group of social scientists that included anthropologist Margaret Mead to determine how disdain for this type of meat might be overcome. One thing they quickly discovered was that when consumers were served cooked offal that wasn’t named, they were far less put off than they were when this meat was named. That’s why the team proposed dubbing these organs variety meats. This appealing new name led to a modest uptick in sales of such meats that didn’t continue following the appearance of pork chops, pot roast, and T-bone steaks after the war.

  Although the name “variety meats” didn’t catch on with the public in any lasting way, some offal-cooking chefs still use it. A website called the Cook’s Thesaurus includes a section on variety meats. This also was the name of a 1982 cookbook that offered recipes for dishes made from the inner organs as well as from the head, feet, ears, and tail of various animals. Of necessity, many such recipes have French names. That’s partly because variety meats have long been a staple of Continental cuisine, partly because English-speaking consumers are more likely to eat something like kidneys if they’re called rognons, and appear in dishes such as brochettes de rognon, rognons au Madère, rognons Bretonne, or rognons de veau Clémentine. If and when Americans begin to eat horse meat, it will most likely be as viande de cheval.

  Continentalizing

  In his novel Nobody’s Fool, Richard Russo depicts two elderly women eating lunch at the Northwoods Motor Inn in upstate New York. Mrs. Gruber has ordered snails, but after sampling one wishes she hadn’t. In fact, Mrs. Gruber has just spit her first bite into a napkin.

  “What was there about the way it looked that made you think it would be good?” asks her companion, Miss Beryl. Russo continues:

  Mrs. Gruber had not responded to this question. Having spit the snail into the napkin, she’d become deeply involved with the problem of what to do with the napkin.

  “It was gray and slimy and nasty looking,” Miss Beryl reminded her friend.

  Mrs. Gruber admitted this was true, but went on to explain that it wasn’t so much the snail itself that had attracted her as the name. “They got their own name in French,” she reminded Miss Beryl, stealthily exchanging her soiled cloth napkin for a fresh one at an adjacent table. “Escargot.”

  There’s also a word in English, Miss Beryl had pointed out. Snail. Probably horse doo had a name in French also, but that didn’t mean God intended for you to eat it.

  When it comes to euphemizing food names, French is a godsend. Those who would not eat a dish under its plain English name might if it’s given a Gallic verbal equivalent. If you’re squeamish about eating calves’ brains but want to try them nonetheless, perhaps in a butter sauce, they might go down better as cervelles de veau au beurre noir. “Swollen goose livers” would not do well on menus, but pâté de foie gras has done just fine.

  Among menu writers, the urge to draw on other languages, especially French, has been nearly irresistible. Restaurateurs were once advised that this was an effective way to “continentalize” their bills of fare. The results are an amusing mishmash of misspelled or misapplied Gallicisms such as the entry on a World War I era Chicago menu for Beef Broth à l’Anglaise (“Beef Broth in the English manner”). This was on the Carte du Jour of the Auditorium Hotel where my great-grandfather Horace Scott often dined. On July 13, 1916, the Auditorium also served Consommé Emanuele, Strained Chicken Gumbo en Tasse, Onion Soup Gratinée, Stuffed Celery à l’Auditorium, Planked Bluefish Maitré d’Hotel, Sea Bass Sauté aux Fines Herbs, Breast of Guinea Hen à la Windsor, and Larded Sirloin à la Nivernaise.

  Continentalizing menu writers have cleaned up their acts somewhat since Horace Scott dined at the Auditorium but not altogether. In contemporary restaurant lingo, “soup” becomes potage; “spaghetti,” pasta; its sauce marinara. At a trendy New York restaurant, the once-humble “mushroom soup” has been upgraded to cappuccino of forest mushrooms. In recent decades arcane foodiespeak has incorporated ostentatious Gallicisms on upscale menus in a kind of fusion argot: Entrecôte au Poivre Madagascar; Stuffed Tomato aux Herbes; Ravioli en Parmigiana, en Casserole; Thyme Fumet Essence; Fraises Charles Stuart; Strawberry Pots de Crème; Short Ribs Provençale with Crème Fraîche Mashed Potatoes; Petites Native Frog Legs Provençale served with Concasseed Tomatoes, touch of Garlic and Spicy Butter.

  Exotic-sounding food names abound on restaurant menus for one simple reason: they move product. In extensive studies of this phenomenon, Cornell University’s Brian Wansink has repeatedly found that menu items with euphemistically elegant names are more likely to be ordered by customers. Restaurateurs already knew this, of course. Squid does better when called by its Italian name, calamari. Shrimp sounds even more tempting as scampi (which is actually Italian for certain types of lobster). When celebrity chef Mario Batali realized that American customers were unlikely to order the seasoned pork fat Italians call lardo, he instructed his waiters to call it prosciutto bianco. Giving foreign names to dubious dishes is key to getting Americans and Britons to try such fare. “You lie to them,” Batali told a reporter. “We mislead them.”

  Due in part to the leadership of adventurous chefs like Batali and Fergus Henderson, once-reviled cuts of meat have begun to enjoy a renaissance, almost an offal chic. Henderson fired the first salvo in this counterattack with a 1998 cookbook called The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating. This was the year that Mario Batali’s flagship restaurant Babbo opened in New York. Over time its menu featured delicacies such as fennel-dusted sweetbreads, tripe alla parmigiana, pig’s foot Milanese, lamb brain Francobolli, and testa, headcheese made from boiled pig brains. In Oakland, California, the Oliveto restaurant has enjoyed some success serving sheep’s milk ravioli with goat sugo and goat chops fried Milanese style.

  Under its own name, goat is a popular meat in many parts of the world. Although it’s featured in some nouveaux restaurants such as Oliveto, few Americans will eat goat no matter what it’s called. Most associate it with either smelly, obstinate barnyard animals or cute ones at petting zoos. Goat meat itself is thought to be tough, bad tasting, and low class. These were the findings of a survey of six hundred Floridians. At the outset, few expressed any interest in sampling this meat. When taking part in a blind taste test, however, more of them liked barbecued goat better than barbecued beef that was prepared the same way. The University of Florida professors who conducted this study concluded that the name “goat” was central to this meat’s image problem in the United States. They thought changing its name to chevon— a euphemism vaguely reminiscent of chèvre, French for goat (and goat milk cheese)—might help create a market for the meat. Goat ranchers use chevon, and that name tested well among study participants. If the flesh of calves can be called veal and that of pigs pork, reasoned the professors, why can’t goat meat be called chevon? In the two decades since this study was conducted, that name hasn’t caught on. To Americans, goat meat remains “goat,” not chevon.

  Relying on foreignisms to sell food can be sabotaged by news headlines, of course. Foreign-based food names are an obvious target when countri
es come into conflict. Remember freedom fries? That short-lived attempt to rename “French fries” during the war in Iraq was too contrived even for those who wanted to give France the back of their hand because of its opposition to this war. At the peak of anti-German hysteria during World War I, sauerkraut (the root of the nickname “krauts” given to German soldiers) was renamed liberty cabbage. This euphemism did not survive the 1918 armistice. Nor did one for Hamburg steak: liberty steak. Australians tried various ways to avoid saying “German sausage” at this time, calling it Belgian sausage, Devon sausage, or Windsor sausage. None took.

  The Power of Positive Euphemizing

  Deep in the waters off Chile swim schools of Dissostichus eleginoides. Chileans call these fish bacalao de profundidad, or “cod of the deep.” English speakers called them Patagonian toothfish. With their bulging eyes, pronounced underbite, and pointy teeth that resemble a giant saw, these huge fish—which grow to be six-feet long and longer in a fifty-year lifespan—are unusually ugly and off-putting. Until recently, the Patagonian toothfish was rarely consumed by anyone. Chileans themselves did not care for its bland, oily flesh.

  In 1977 a Los Angeles–based fish importer named Lee Lantz saw a Patagonian toothfish that had been caught by accident splayed on a Valparaiso dock. Several days later, he saw another one at a Santiago fish market and bought a filet. After cooking and eating his filet, Lantz wondered if this omega-3-packed fish might suit the American palate better than the Chilean. Its name was a problem, though. Following much rumination, and after passing on “Pacific Sea Bass” and “South American Sea Bass,” Lantz settled on Chilean sea bass. Under this moniker, it was bought first for fish sticks, then by Chinese restaurateurs, and finally by chefs at upscale restaurants such as the Four Seasons in New York. Within a few years of its renaming, Chilean sea bass became so popular that stocks of this slow-growing fish were depleted by what author G. Bruce Knecht in his 2006 book Hooked called “an unsustainable feeding frenzy.” A boycott campaign dubbed “Take a Pass on Chilean Sea Bass” prompted many restaurants to stop serving this now-too-popular fish.