by Ralph Keyes
11
Why We Euphemize
EUPHEMISMS HAVE A bright side and a dark side. On the one hand, they can be a source of evasion, a way to avoid topics that should be confronted and of choosing not to face unpleasant truths. At worst, euphemisms are employed by politicians, bureaucrats, merchants, and others as tools of manipulation. On the other hand, when used judiciously, euphemisms can civilize discourse and be a welcome form of courtesy in rude times. Does anyone want to routinely take part in conversations larded with “shits” and “fucks,” let alone hear them constantly in the media? At the very least, that gets tedious. In the right spirit, euphemisms can be creative, verbal fresheners and a great source of fun (as Shakespeare knew better than anyone). They also allow us to allude to private matters in public, mediate gender issues, and identify each other’s origins.
The primary social value of euphemisms is that they make it possible to discuss touchy topics while pretending we’re talking about something else. Ideally, all parties know exactly what’s under consideration and can discuss it obliquely without having to admit what they’re up to. “Your place or mine?” is so much more civil an invitation than “Wanna ball?” It also gives the inviter deniability. (“I meant just for a chat.”) As French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it, euphemisms double our profits when speaking—“the profit of saying and the profit of denying what is said.”
To Bourdieu, all communication is more or less euphemized, from the least consequential conversation to the most learned work of scholarship. We constantly monitor what we say, assess how much candor is permissible, then decide what kind of euphemisms to use. Everyone calibrates their speech to suit various audiences. College students who don’t use euphemisms when discussing sex or body functions with dorm mates fall back on them among peers whom they don’t know. (One amused researcher observed that many respondents who told her the word “fuck” didn’t offend them, in e-mails referred to it as “the f-word, “- -ck,” and “f- - -.”) Even though my wife and I are freely profane with each other, we’re less so around our two grown sons, and hardly at all among others. With those outside our family, we’re as apt as anyone to call “fucking,” sleeping together; and “shit,” feces. Why so? Among other reasons, this is simply to raise the level of conversational comfort, for ourselves as much as for others. Replacing bad words with good ones can make us feel better, inside and out.
Comfort
When we say we’re making other people comfortable by using euphemisms, we’re just as likely to be comforting ourselves. Evasive words we rely on to protect the sensibilities of others also protect our own. Imagine an exchange in which someone asks, “Where’s Jason?” The most direct, accurate response might be, “He’s in the can taking a shit.” Few of us would say this, however. Instead, we might respond, “He had to excuse himself for a few minutes,” or simply, “He’ll be back shortly.” Do we speak this way primarily to protect the tender ears of our listeners? Or to keep them from thinking that we’re the sort of person who uses coarse language (even if we do offstage)?
When we think others can’t identify us, we’re far more prone to forgo euphemisms. During anonymous interactions, particularly on the Internet, euphemistic discourse drops dramatically. Why bother? A study conducted at Lafayette College found that subjects who thought their identities would be revealed used more euphemisms for unpleasant phenomena, such as urine and feces, than did those who assumed they’d remain anonymous. This suggests that the desire to save one’s own face may be an even stronger motivator than the wish to protect other people’s feelings. When one’s identity isn’t known, however, there’s no face to save. Speak freely. If others know who’s speaking, though, the need to protect one’s dignity soars. The euphemisms that ensue create a cloak of privacy.
Privacy
Like slang, euphemisms allow those in the know to discuss private matters openly while keeping other people in the dark. Unlike slang, euphemisms are usually innocuous enough to escape notice. For that reason, they have proved especially useful to members of ostracized groups.
At a time when theirs was “the love that dare not speak its name,” homosexuals used euphemisms to communicate in code. According to biographer Gary Schmidgall, Oscar Wilde’s plays were filled with euphemistic winks at gay friends, such as these lines from A Woman of No Importance: “Women kneel so gracefully; men don’t,” and “The future belongs to the dandy. It is the exquisites who are going to rule.” Since earnest was a sometime euphemism for homosexuality in Wilde’s days, the very title of his play The Importance of Being Earnest may have been a nod to gays and a tweak of straights’ noses.
In Wilde’s time, “aesthetes” was often applied semi-euphemistically to those of his sexual preference. During the 1930s, some British homosexuals called themselves musical or artistic. Because they were so often called, and frequently called themselves, pansies, buttercups, and fruit, some said ironically that they were horticultural lads.
Between the world wars, gay became a term homosexual men used to discreetly identify each other. “Supposing one met a stranger on a train from Boston to New York and wanted to find out whether he was ‘wise’ or even homosexual,” wrote such a man on the eve of World War II. “One might ask: ‘Are there any gay spots in Boston?’ And by slight accent put on the word ‘gay’ the stranger, if wise, would understand that homosexual resorts were meant. The uninitiated stranger would never suspect, inasmuch as ‘gay’ is also a perfectly normal and natural word to apply to places where one has a good time.”
After “gay” lost its utility as a sub-rosa code word, new ones were called for. Since Judy Garland was such a gay icon, friend of Dorothy— referring to the role Garland played in The Wizard of Oz— became euphemistic for “homosexual.” A gay friend of mine recently took a cruise on which a sign reading FRIENDS OF BILL MEET AT 7 P.M. (referring to Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson) was posted side by side with an announcement for a gathering of FRIENDS OF DOROTHY.
Like gays, heterosexual couples commonly develop a euphemistic private language that allows them to communicate in public with no one the wiser. One couple uses “Let’s go for a bike ride” as a way of saying, “Let’s go smoke some marijuana.” “Let’s go home and watch some TV” is a second couple’s way of saying, “Let’s leave and make love.” Other couples’ code phrases for “Let’s make love” include “My ears are popping,” “I want some ice cream,” and “Wanna do a load of laundry?”
A young unmarried couple who took part in a study of partners’ unique idioms said one of the main reasons they’d developed their own sexual euphemisms was so they could mention this topic on the sly when around their parents. Another couple—who’d nicknamed the man’s penis “Peter J. Firestone”—were more specific about how they did this. He got a kick out of asking, “Would you like to double-date with Peter tonight?” in the presence of his mother and father, hoping they wouldn’t notice his girlfriend’s beet-red face. A third couple, who’d nicknamed the man’s penis “Winston” (based on the cigarette slogan “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should”), enjoyed discussing “Winston’s good taste” in the presence of friends and family.
As this illustrates, creating euphemisms can be an inventive, good-humored way to safely skirt taboos. There’s a world of difference between prudishly insisting on the use of vague words for earthy topics and developing an imaginative vocabulary to say the unsayable.
GREEBLES, TWANGERS, AND DOOEYS
Members of a family in Arizona know that when they’re discussing underwear, bookcase means “bra.” That’s because a mortified preteen daughter in this family warned her mother that when they went shopping for her first brassiere, if anyone asked where they were going, the mother was to say, “Out to buy a bookcase.”
Every family develops its own euphemisms, ones that have meaning only to them. Bork and scrog are used as all-purpose expletives in a family that coined them. (“Bork you!” “You’re scroggin’ kiddin’ me!”) Another f
amily refers to all body secretions as goozlies. Yet a third calls “farts” boofs because—when asked if she had a “number two” in her diaper—a toddler in this family responded, “No, Mom, it was just a boof.”
Euphemisms like these tend to be event based, referencing shared episodes. Members of one Missouri family call making the best of a bad situation “getting your curtains up.” This recalls the year when they hired a part-time minister to paint their rambling old house. He turned out to be better at preaching than painting. As his customers surveyed the damage, their preacher-painter suggested cheerfully, “It’ll look better once you get your curtains up.”
During a month-long drive across the country, our skinny thirteen-year-old concluded that “refreshing” was a euphemism for jumping into excruciatingly cold bodies of water, and that “scenic” was the word his parents used to describe long, boring stretches of undeveloped land. Ever since then, those words have been our own private euphemisms: refreshing for “freezing” and scenic for “boring.” (“That party sure was scenic.”) During an earlier trip, we were stranded for days in central Illinois while waiting for an axle to arrive from Michigan so our car could be repaired. This part was a “Detroit item,” we were told. As a result, Detroit item became our euphemism for any hard-to-find product. In a similar vein, seasonal is what we call a product that’s not available, because a nearby dairy always says about ice-cream flavors they’re out of or no longer sell, “That one’s seasonal.” (Rocky Road?)
One reason families develop such personalized references is to have secret words known only to club members. These can be fun to conjure. The inventive mother of novelist David Foster Wallace enjoyed creating words for her children to use: greebles for “lint” (particularly the bits that catch between toes), and twanger for something whose name escapes your mind. Since John Cheever got so many traffic tickets for driving under the influence (DUI), the author’s wife and children took to calling them dooeys. When the father of Australian writer Mark Kurzem engaged in a bit too much hyperbole, his wife told him, “You’ve put the enlarger on again, luv.”
Many families invent code words to warn a male that his fly is open: Burtie in the case of one Indiana family (because they had a neighbor by that name whose fly was constantly unzipped), or one invented by Catherine Storr’s grandson: “You’ve lost your license.” (The boy couldn’t say where this came from.) For reasons mislaid in the mists of their collective history, members of another family say Clara to warn each other that their slacks are stuck in their buttock cheeks.
Creativity
Those subjected to censorship have historically relied on euphemisms to get their message across in the face of strict limits on the words they’re allowed to use. Doing this can spur their imaginations. Mae West said she would never have become such an imaginative purveyor of double entendres if she hadn’t been forced to play cat and mouse with the Hays Office. Scriptwriters for contemporary sitcoms find that the need to get around network standards and practices restrictions forces them to be creative. In an episode of Friends, one character says of another, whose penis is peeking out of his unusually short shorts, “The man is showing brain!” Writers for How I Met Your Mother didn’t just replace “bitch” with grinch but conjured reading a magazine as a euphemism for “in the bathroom pooping.” As a gibe at censorship, when the movie Repo Man ran on television, its director substituted melon farmer for “motherfucker.” Others picked up that beat. In the televised version of Die Hard: With a Vengeance, Samuel L. Jackson calls another character a “racist melon farmer.”
Some TV scriptwriters have created an alternative euphemistic vocabulary altogether to work their way around censors. Writers for Gossip Girl have come up with fustercluck, motherchucker, and basshole. When unusually vexed, trolls on The Tenth Kingdom said “Suck an elf!” or “Sniff a sandal!” As for taboo sex talk, Fox TV’s House M.D. included this exchange between Dr. House and a mother who thinks her young daughter may be having epileptic seizures:
House: In actuality, all your little girl is doing… is saying yoo-hoo to the hoo-hoo.
Mother: She’s what?
House: Marching the penguin. Ya-yaing the Sisterhood. Finding Nemo.
[…]
Mother: Are you saying she’s masturbating?
House: I was trying to be discreet. There’s a child in the room.
From the creative tropes of today’s scriptwriters to the punning euphemisms of Shakespeare, double entendres of Mae West, and elaborate metaphors employed by authors from Swift to Tolstoy, remarkable creativity can be summoned to make one’s point indirectly. At a reading, I once heard a poet use the term moist underbelly of pleasure. Better that than “vagina.” Creating euphemisms this way demands far more of a writer than resorting to taboo words does. When comedians rely on profanity for laughs, it’s not so much their lack of taste that offends as their lack of imagination.
The kind of ingenuity summoned by those who need to euphemize certain words can fertilize languages. Because some Polynesian dialects banned the use of so many terms (including ones even tangentially associated with a sovereign or a sovereign’s near relatives), those languages were continually refreshed with new euphemistic words that replaced older taboo ones. As we’ve seen, English too is filled with words that were originally created to skirt sensitive subjects (e.g., cemetery, halitosis, downsize).
Not just in literature, but in everyday discourse, euphemisms show imagination. After finding so many synonyms for “bull” in use among ill-educated New England farmers half a century ago, linguist H. D. Rowe concluded that such substitute words most likely are more prevalent in the spoken vernacular than in the written one. Rowe cautioned against belittling such “barnyard bowdlerism,” writing, “While we can adopt a superior pose and say that it proceeds from the distortions of a diseased mind, we must recognize that there is a certain amount of verbal genius among a people who can invent forty-two circumlocutions in order to avoid uttering the undesired syllable.” Noting how many fewer euphemisms were used by better-educated groups he studied, Rowe added, “I have not been able to determine whether this disparity… is caused by some inherent dirtiness of mind in the lesser educated or a dismal lack of verbal ingenuity on the part of the more learned.”
Class
The euphemisms we use and those we spurn are important class markers. Many words considered crude by proper speakers have historically been used freely by members of the lower classes. (Which is one reason to avoid them, of course, to create distance from the foul-mouthed masses.) Apparently, the closer one is to the grass roots, the earthier one’s language becomes. In English, earthy words tend to be Anglo-Saxon in origin, those favored by genteel speakers more Latinized.
Word choice reveals social status as much as accents do. This was a key idea expounded by Nancy Mitford in a celebrated distinction she made between “U” (upper-class) and “non-U” speech—referring to those whom Americans might call “highbrow” and “lowbrow.” Drawing on the work of linguist Alan Ross, Mitford wrote in her 1956 book Noblesse Oblige, “one U-speaker recognizes another U-speaker almost as soon as he opens his mouth.” At that time dentures were worn by the upper classes, false teeth by the lower. Lavatory was the preferred upper-class euphemism for England’s smallest rooms, the WC more common among members of the working class. Lavatory-paper was U; toilet-paper, non-U (which, as Russell Lynes pointed out in his introduction to the American edition of Mitford’s book, made all Americans non-U).
Those who aspire to rise from a lower to a higher class regard euphemisms as a ladder to help them climb the status cliff. From their perspective, constant euphemizing is an essential part of the upwardly mobile package. Pygmalion’s Professor Higgins, after all, was sure that refining Eliza Doolittle’s “kerbstone English” was her ticket to a better class. The attempt to emulate U-talk by slavish use of euphemisms is self-defeating, however. U’s themselves speak as they please. I still recall being startled when a doyenne from a
n old Boston family, whom I’d never met, casually dropped the word “fart” into a telephone conversation. Even as the lower classes use terms considered vulgar and the middle classes studiously avoid them, members of the upper classes feel free to roam about, picking and choosing which words suit them as a part of their birthright. Those whom non- U’s called wealthy, U’s themselves called rich. Patients whom non- U’s euphemistically called ill, U’s said were sick. They used the good Old English term mad for those whom non-U’s more politely called mental.
As these examples suggest, euphemistic nods are not always upward. The rich can be remarkably plainspoken. That’s what makes insistent euphemizing a futile form of status seeking. When it comes to euphemistic speaking, the distinction between U and non-U is too crude. Historically, members of the middle classes have been most prone to rely on euphemisms, those in the upper and lower classes most likely to eschew them.
In a discussion of euphemisms for lavatories, lexicographer James McDonald writes that “Australians, like the British upper and lower classes, have traditionally taken a positive pleasure in discussing lavatorial matters. Hence the free use of terms such as crap house, shit house, and thunder box.” McDonald believes that middle-class Britons are most prone to using euphemisms such as whatsit, you know, powder room, or cloakroom when saying where it is they’ve excused themselves to go. Alternatively, “I’m going to the euphemism.”
Due to their variegated class structure, Americans even more than the English listen closely for subtle clues about who stands where. “Class” itself is a word seldom heard in a society that’s supposed to be egalitarian. Since Americans like to imagine that one person is as good as another, class divisions are hard for them to discuss openly. It’s the elephant in their demographic living room. Euphemisms are a capital way to allude to distinctions of class without using that ugly term. Members of America’s upper classes wouldn’t dream of using this phrase to describe themselves but don’t hesitate to talk of our kind. Americans wince at references to the lower class or working class but freely talk about blue-collar workers who carry lunch buckets and go by the collective nickname Joe Sixpack. A more contemporary way to sort out class differences is by marketplace presence: Walmart shoppers, Volvo drivers, Starbucks denizens, etc.