The Downfall of the Modern Euphemism

One of my friends is spending the semester in Uganda, and in one of the long e-mails I got from her describing her life there, she mentioned that in the culture of her host family, talking about any kind of bodily function is completely taboo.

“People here don’t say ‘bathroom.’ They say, ‘I’m coming back,’ or ‘she has gone,’ or there is the expression to go for a ‘short call’ or ‘long call,’” she wrote.

In the local culture of my experience—that of Columbia University—it seems as if there is very little that is unspeakable or taboo. When people want to talk about something, they just go out and say it, as an excruciating elevator ride I took yesterday with two boys discussing the details of their previous weekend’s post-party sickness gruesomely attests to. It does not seem like there are many occasions when a euphemism like “long call” is required.

Using euphemisms to refer to something generally known, but not generally discussed, is a habit of speech that has been very common in English at different times. The Victorians (everyone’s favorite prudes) had euphemisms for seemingly everything related to the physical, from “gentleman cows” (bulls), to “the bread basket” (your stomach), to “ammunition” (toilet paper). These days, however, you hardly ever hear anyone talking about “going to see a man about a horse,” or “buying the farm.”
Is the fall of the euphemism a bad thing? I’m no Miss Manners, but surely there are acts that don’t need to get talked about explicitly. It seems that some things benefit from appellations like “number 1 and number 2.”

On the other hand, you don’t need to read Harry Potter (“He Who Must Not Be Named”) to know that shying away from naming something makes that thing threatening. In a chicken-or-egg style argument, you could say that it’s not that something is unmentionable because it’s bad, but that not talking about it makes it seem so. That is certainly one of the messages behind The Vagina Monologues, a show that makes a point of naming and reclaiming “all things south.”

Euphemisms may sometimes create monsters, but they also tame them. They make it possible to avoid discussion of painful issues. Saying that the dog was “put to sleep,” or even “put down” hurts a lot less than thinking about what actually happened, just as saying that people came under “friendly fire,” or even that they were “casualties,” is a lot less horrifying than saying that they were shot to death. Wikipedia’s article about euphemisms devotes a whole section to what it terms “doublespeak,” or “language deliberately constructed to disguise or distort its actual meaning,” distinguished from other euphemisms by its deliberate usage. It gives examples of doublespeak as “wet work” for assassination, or “offgassing” for pollution. Talking about these sorts of things using euphemisms, or doublespeak, can be a way of avoiding their questionable morality.

Euphemism, it seems, is a powerful tool—and like any power, its use requires great responsibility. Referring to anything by a name that hides its true nature is dangerous. This is particularly true when the thing euphemistically referred to is a human being, since the other name for calling a person by a term they have not chosen is epithet. It seems that in many cases, euphemisms are best avoided, as they tend to fill discussions with obfuscation and add little else to communication.

But there are some times when euphemism is unavoidable. In this paper, for example, it is almost always forbidden to write out any “expletives,” or “four letter words.” Also, there are conversations, and not just the ones you have with your grandmother’s friends, when it might be advisable not to mention a “trip to the powder room” in any stronger language. Particularly as an alternative to vulgarity, euphemisms can add color rather than off-color to discourse. They can make phrases funny that would otherwise just be gross. Try working “seeing a man about a horse” into your regular speech—you’ll probably be able to get some laughs.

chloe.smith@columbiaspectator.com