Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms

by Ralph Keyes

  Demographic is a modern way to refer indirectly to class. (“Which demographic would you say she belongs to?”) ZIP code is related. What used to be called a good or bad neighborhood, or the right or wrong side of the tracks today is just as likely to be referenced by ZIP code. The Internet buzzes with inquiries such as “Is [75201] a good ZIP code to live in? Is it safe and in a good area?” and “Is 90048 a good ZIP code to raise a family in?” (Answer: “It’s a sensational ZIP code…. Prohibitive prices keep out the riffraff.”) Riffraff. What might that refer to? Residents of inner cities, perhaps.

  Code

  Inner city is not just a geographical concept but a term that refers to the place where blacks live. Or, one might say, urban settings. Urban began as a mere synonym for “city,” then referred to black ghettos, and recently has become an allusion to African Americans themselves. The literary genre of novels called urban fiction is written by black authors for black readers. A satellite radio channel devoted to rhythm-and-blues music sung primarily by black singers is labeled “Urban.”

  When it comes to ethnicity and race, euphemisms reach new heights of subtlety. The ubiquitous concept of cultural fit that corporations rely on when looking for new hires can mask all manner of bias. In football, calling a quarterback “athletic” can be a way of saying he is African American without saying so directly. Casting ethnic minorities in roles usually filled by white actors is considered nontraditional casting. When plantation is part of the name given to southern housing developments, the implication is “Blacks might not feel comfortable here.”

  A former resident of Detroit once told me that this city used to be a good one until “they ruined it.” On another occasion, I listened to a resident of Allentown, Pennsylvania, struggle to convey to me how a certain element was degrading that city’s downtown neighborhoods. In a recent twist, some racially prejudiced Americans have taken to calling blacks Canadians so they can discuss their feelings about them in public without fear of reproach. (“The Canadians are taking over!”) During a visit to Canada itself, I noticed how freely Albertans use Muslims as an all-purpose euphemism for immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia, who presumably include Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians.

  When euphemisms for ethnic groups enter our conversations, the intent seldom has anything to do with courtesy and sensitivity. Such euphemisms routinely double as code words that allow those of ill will to express their bigotry out loud. Long after the fact, Harvard Law School professor Alexander Bickel recalled how a white-shoe law firm refused to hire him because of his antecedents (i.e., his parents were Jewish immigrants). Memoirist Jane Juska remembered her father’s warning as she was about to leave for college: “There will be loud people in your classes who talk all the time and are pushy.” Juska’s response was to date a Jewish classmate.

  In politics, euphemism as code abounds. Some call this dog whistle discourse; audible only to the cognoscenti. Ethnicity is not the only topic alluded to. During the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain’s aides accused Barack Obama’s campaign of age-baiting their seventy-three-year-old candidate by calling him confused. Obama’s camp in turn wanted to know exactly what a McCain backer was getting at when he called the Illinois senator “John Kerry with a tan.” During the same campaign, conservative senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) warned supporters of his re-election that “the other folks are voting,” leaving little doubt about what color those other folks were in a year when an African American candidate for president was bringing black voters to the polls in unprecedented numbers. As president, Barack Obama said he wanted to appoint a Supreme Court justice who had “empathy,” a term many took as code for “a woman.”

  Gender

  In the not-too-distant past, knowing when to call a breast a bosom, a leg a limb, and realizing who sweat, who perspired, and who merely glowed was central to talking like a lady. Blunt, often profane talk was considered a sign of male virility, while an indirect, highly euphemized manner of speech was associated with femininity. As Robin Lakoff concluded in her 1975 book Language and Women’s Place, “women are the experts at euphemism.”

  When their pursuit of status became more focused on salary and power, however, women began to spurn reliance on euphemisms. The table turned. Blunt speech became a way to demonstrate what one wasn’t: not dainty, not suburban, not my mother. Someone who talked straight, not slant. Straight talk signified a woman who could hold her own in the rough-and-tumble worlds of business, politics, sports, and military service. A woman who was willing to forgo euphemisms to speak plainly and profanely demonstrated that she was one of the guys. During Columbia University’s campus uprising in 1968, a psychologist who taught there observed that coeds were far more likely to curse at police officers than men were.

  Among themselves, post-Victorian women have not always been dainty speakers. The talk during a girls’ night out can be no less direct and profane than that used by men playing poker. Which words women—or men, for that matter—know and are willing to use is not the issue. Where one is willing to speak plainly and where euphemistically is what’s at issue, especially when men and women are speaking to each other. But even here the rules have changed. Words like “boobs,” “bitch,” and “bullshit” have become more acceptable in mixed company in a way that would have horrified our grandparents. No euphemisms necessary. Such candid talk is not always appropriate, however, though for different reasons than in the past. Nowadays it isn’t the vulgarity of such words that offends so much as the presumed familiarity. (“Do you know me well enough to refer to my ‘boobs’?”) When men converse with women, the offensiveness of noneuphemistic talk itself isn’t as off-putting as the intimacy such talk implies.

  Where two or more men are gathered, overuse of euphemisms is generally considered effete. Yet, when women are present, even the most foulmouthed men will usually resort to euphemisms as a matter of courtesy. Implied permission to skip evasive words and go straight to plain talk may be seen as a sign of closeness. For a woman to respond to or even acknowledge a sexual reference by a man can signal availability. Candid language, in turn, can be a probe, a way men determine just how sexually responsive a newly-met woman might be. A friend of mine who hitchhiked across the United States with another young woman told me that truckers who picked them up would routinely test them with an obscene word here, an off-color comment there. If the driver got no response, “then he treated us like we were his sisters.”

  Of course, speaking with guarded tongues is hardly a woman’s art alone. Men have their own taste for oblique language. One study of cell phone chatting found that women who engaged in this practice called it what it is: gossip. Men did not. “We don’t like to call it gossip,” admitted one, “because it sounds trivial—as though you have nothing better to do.” What did men call their cell chatting? Keeping in touch. Exchanging information.

  In the end, it’s all verbal kabuki. Anyone who gives more than cursory thought to euphemizing realizes its ultimate futility. For one thing, the more intently we use euphemisms, the faster they become tainted. Because they become obsolete so quickly, euphemisms can date those who use them and flag them as prissy. Finally, euphemisms too often defeat their own purpose. Substitute words routinely produce a quick mental translation to the word for which they’ve substituted. After translating them, one must reflect on the topic being avoided, and speculate about the euphemizer’s motives. (Why did Amy talk about getting to know Jason last night when everyone knows they were upstairs boinking? I didn’t think Eric was so uptight that he had to say he was going outside to tinkle.)

  The risks of using euphemisms are not difficult to surmise. So why do we continue to use so many? The obvious reasons aren’t always the real ones. Our motives for relying on substitute words can be complicated and contradictory. We often use them when a more direct term would have done just as well: for the sake of appearances, to save face, or for the sheer hell of it. Or who knows why? A felt need to speak euphemistically taps mo
tivations that aren’t always rational or conscious. The fact that human beings have relied on evasive speech for so long and in so many different forms suggests that there might be an innate need to express ourselves indirectly.

  The Euphemizing Instinct

  When taking notes for an essay about my mother’s death, I found I could only do so by writing “dth,” much like an observant Jew writing “G-d.” This wasn’t a conscious choice. Writing the letters d-e-a-t-h was simply something my fingers wouldn’t do. That alone hardly suggests a hardwired need to euphemize, but other evidence does. Is it entirely voluntary when a soldier says he offed or dispatched or neutralized an enemy soldier rather than saying he killed him? Or when those who lived in close proximity to bears chose to call them honey-eaters?

  It’s well established that humans have a gene called FOXP2 that allows us to speak. We also know that different parts of our brains manage speech differently. Those who lose their ability to use complex language after suffering damage to the parts of the brain that control conscious thought processes often retain an ability to curse that’s rooted in the more primitive limbic region of their brains. Some linguists believe that swearing is only a distant cousin to speaking per se, more an ejaculation than a serious attempt to communicate. That could explain why the capacity to use bad words often outlives the loss of an ability to use good ones. Following a stroke, say, some patients who are incapable of saying, “How are you?” can still exclaim, “Damn!” or “Shit!” Although “shit” was among the few words one stroke victim could utter, when given a piece of paper with that word written on it and asked to read what he saw, the man could not. Evidence such as this suggests that cursing may be a form of protolanguage that has more in common with a dog’s bark than, say, Plato’s Republic. In some cases, swearing is more of a reflex than a deliberate choice of words, including euphemistic alternatives. No one who hits his thumb with a hammer exclaims “Intercourse!” or “Excrement!”

  Metaphorically speaking, swearing is part of our hardwired ROM (“read only”) memory, while euphemizing is controlled by newer, more flexible RAM (“random access”) circuits found in the cerebral cortex. Evasive speech apparently originates in the newer parts of our brain where complex thought originates. While words that we utter spontaneously when provoked are more likely to emerge from the uncensored limbic brain, given an opportunity to ruminate we turn to the cortex and choose from among its vast supply of euphemisms. Since the brain and a capacity to speak have evolved jointly, it may even be that creating euphemisms contributed to our ability to think. If this is true, then euphemistic speech and the brain fit each other like a lock and key.

  “Euphemism is such a pervasive human phenomenon,” noted University of Chicago linguist Joseph Williams, “so deeply woven into virtually every known culture, that one is tempted to claim that every human has been pre-programmed to find ways to talk around tabooed subjects.” Euphemistic words for topics such as bears and flatulence are among our oldest and most universal. Medical researcher Valerie Curtis thinks that a need for euphemisms to refer to body secretions and other toxic effluvia could be one of the earliest linguistic imperatives felt by human beings. The same thing might be true of euphemisms for sexual activity, a topic that is typically taboo because of its potential for disrupting the social order (among other things).

  In the process of concocting substitute words for such subjects, early humans undoubtedly realized how much fun this could be. One might even argue that the need to come up with euphemisms for terms considered taboo is our most ancient source of verbal creativity. After all, it’s far more difficult to say what one doesn’t mean than what one does. An ability to do so—to create euphemisms and use them effectively—demonstrates a high order of intellectual sophistication.

  If we accept the pure logic of natural selection, a capacity to euphemize may have arisen and stuck around because of the adaptive advantage it gave human beings who were good at it. From this perspective, those who best demonstrated an ability to express themselves euphemistically gained an edge in the evolutionary sweepstakes. We are their heirs.

  Acknowledgments

  For his exacting and helpful reading of this book’s manuscript, my brother Gene deserves special thanks. So does Rosalie Maggio, for her solid feedback on the manuscript. My brother Steve and sister, Nicky, gave me ongoing support on this book as they did on my others. As ever, my sons David and Scott gave me invaluable assistance along the way. Librarians at the Greene County Library were their usual helpful selves on this project, as were those at Antioch University’s Olive Kettering Library, especially Ritch Kerns, Sandy Coulter, and Scott Sanders. I would also like to thank Sol Steinmetz, for steering me toward this project, and Helena Santini, for helping launch it.

  For help with specific aspects of this book, my thanks to Andi Adkins, Larry Ballen, Joseph Barbato, Nancy Lowe Clapp, Gay Courter, Joycie Singer D’Aprile, John Dickinson, Paul Dickson, Bob Fogarty, Gene Forsythe, Leonard Roy Frank, Louis Goldman, Brad Hadfield, Lou and Jonellen Heckler, Jill Hershorin, Virgil Hervey, Holly Hudson, Richard Langworth, Linda Lesher, Priscilla Long, Rosalie Minkin, Patrick O’Connor, Philomene Offen, Kathryn Olney, Bill Phillips, Nindy Silvie, David Smith, Jane Tomlin, and Mary Tom Watts.

  My agent, Colleen Mohyde, gave me her usual valuable guidance, support, and reading of the manuscript. My editor, Tracy Behar, was helpful beyond the call with her painstaking reading and rereading of the manuscript, as was her assistant Christina Rodriguez. I didn’t realize that this type of careful, thoughtful line editing was still done and am grateful for it. Marie Salter’s meticulous copyediting made this a better book. Every writer should have the kind of backing that Little, Brown’s crack marketing and publicity teams—Heather Fain, Marlena Bittner, Amanda Tobier, Brittany Boughter, and Brianne Beers—have given Euphemania. Thanks also to Amanda Brown, associate director of domestic subsidiary rights.

  Most of all, I would like to thank my wife, Muriel, whose help with research, manuscript review, and overall good counsel improved the quality of this book (to say the least). Every writer needs a wise counselor, and Muriel is mine.

  Any book such as this draws on the work of others. The principal works that I consulted follow. Detailed notes on sources for specific discussions in this book can be found in the “Euphemania” section of my website: www.ralphkeyes.com.

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