Euphemisms and phenomenon of political correctness

Euphemisms and phenomenon of political correctness

Euphemism, as is known, is a word or phrase used to replace an unpleasant word or expression by a conventionally more acceptable one, for example, the word 'to die' has bred the following euphemisms: to pass away, to expire, to be no more, to depart, to join the majority, to begone, and the more facetious ones: to kick the bucket, to give up the ghost, to go west. So euphemisms are synonyms which aim at producing a deliberately mild effect.

The origin of the term 'euphemism' discloses the aim of the device very clearly, i.e. speaking well (from Greek – eu = well + -pheme = speaking). Euphemism is sometimes figuratively called "a whitewashing device". The linguistic peculiarity of euphemism lies in the fact that every euphemism must call up a definite synonym in the mind of the reader or listener.

Language changes all the time, new words appear continuously while the old ones disappear. Euphemism is not an exception and it undergoes a process of metabolism too. The life of euphemisms is short. They very soon become closely associated with the referent (the object named) and give way to a newly-coined word or combination of words, and they change with time. For example, the madhouse became the lunatic asylum; the asylum made way for the mental hospital – even if the building remained the same. Idiots, imbeciles and the feeble-minded became low, medium and high-grade mental defectives. All are now to be lumped together as patients of severely subnormal personality. The insane became persons of unsound mind, and are now to be mentally-ill patients.

Another example, ‘She is pregnant’ has many different euphemistic expressions in different eras:

• She has canceled all her social engagements. (1856)
• She is in an interesting condition. (1880)
• She is in a delicate condition. (1895)
• She is knitting little bootees. (1910)
• She is in a family way. (1920)
• She is expecting. (1935)
• She is pregnant. (1956)

Albert C. Baugh gives another instance of such changes:

“The common word for a woman's undergarment down to the eighteenth century was 'smock'. It was then replaced by the more delicate word 'shift'. In the nineteenth century the same motive led to the substitution of the word 'chemise' and in the twentieth this has been replaced by 'combinations', 'step-ins', and other euphemisms." Today we have different words denoting similar garmnets, as “briefs” etc.

We use euphemisms in different spheres of life without considering which euphemism to use and when. The most recognized categories of euphemisms are the following:

1. Profession euphemisms:

In western countries, mental work is considered to be the high job whereas physical labor is recognized as humble work, besides there is a great difference in the remuneration. Thus, most of the people hold that people with different occupations have different status in society. Some lowly paid or indecent jobs are often used in English culture just for saving face and expressing politeness. Therefore there are fewer occupations called jobs, many have become professions. Some words and forms like engineer are more popular among people in the communication. English euphemisms are used to express some fancy occupational titles, which can elevate the people’s status. Many previously unwelcome professions have now taken more appealing names. For example, in profession euphemisms, people always use cleaning operative for road sweeper or dustman, sanitation engineer for garbage man, meat technologist for butcher, and hairdresser has turned into beautician, etc.

2. Disease euphemisms：

In the disease euphemisms, people always use long illness replaces for cancer, social disease replaces for syphilis and AIDS, also they use lung trouble substitutes for tuberculosis and so on. And if someone with a mental illness, we cannot say psychosis directly, we should say he or she is a little confused, meanwhile, we should use hard of hearing in stand of deaf.

3. Death euphemisms：

In many societies, because death is feared, so people tend to avoid mentioning death directly and talk about it in a euphemistic way. They try to employ pleasant terms to express the ideas. So death has hundreds of soft, decent, and better-sounding names, such as breathe one’s last, fall asleep, go west, join the majority, lay down one's life, pass away, pay the debt of nature, reach a better world, to be at peace, to return to the dust, or he worked until he breathed his last, etc.

4. Sex euphemisms：

Euphemisms concerning sex: the great divide, willing woman, gay boy, can be used to replace divorce, loose woman, male homosexual. Prostitute can be replaced by lost girl, or a woman of a certain type

5. Crime euphemisms：

In the field of crime euphemism: five-fingers, gentleman of the road, hero of the underground, the candy man are often used to substitute for pickpocket, robber, heroin, and drug pusher.

6. Political euphemisms：

Since the function of euphemism can reduce the unpleasantness of a term or notion, it is natural that announcements of governments will often resort them to understate the facts, e.g. student unrest can be used to replace student strike; police action, search and clear, war games are used to substitute for aggression, massacre and war exercise

Political euphemisms are of greatest interest. Nowadays such term as “political correctness” is very popular in politics, mass media. Political correctness (PC) is a term used to describe language, ideas, policies, or behaviour seen as seeking to minimize offence to gender, racial, cultural, disabled, aged or other identity groups. The terms ‘politically correct’ and ‘political correctness’, in the sense defined above, entered the language via the U.S. feminist and other left-wing movements of the 1970s. The use of ‘PC’ language quickly spread to other parts of the industrialized world.

The aim of political euphemisms is to mislead public opinion and to express what is unpleasant in a more delicate manner. Sometimes disagreeable facts are even distorted with the help of a euphemistic expression. Thus the headline in one of the British newspapers "Tension in Kashmir" was to hide the fact that there was a real uprising in that area; "Undernourishment of children in India" stood for ‘starvation'’.

Euphemism is a tool for political participants to hide scandals, disguise the truth, guide public thoughts when discussing social issues or events. Political euphemism has three typical features:

1) Greater Degree of Deviation from its Signified

Language signs are a combination of the signifier, the phonetic forms of language and the signified, and objects in existence represented by linguistic forms. Due to the lack of direct or logical relations between the two, they have a discretionary relationship with each other, making it possible to create euphemism by replacing the signifier. Because euphemism is just created by transforming the signifier to enlarge the association distance between the signifier and the signified, euphemism meanings stay relative to their former zero-degree ones. Although euphemism and its former zero-degree signifier refer to the same signified, political euphemism is different from those commonly used euphemistic forms in order to avoid death and other physical phenomena in that it deviates greatly from the meaning expressed by its former signifier, or even a complete distortion. For example, Former US President Reagan once named the 10-warhead intermediate-range missile as ‘peacekeeper’; some later political participants named their attack as ‘active defense’; they even replaced ‘recession’ with ‘negative growth’ because it sounded offensive to the ear. It is quite obvious that these expressions are not a simple replacement of the former zero-degree signifier, but quite opposite meanings to their literal meanings, just like replacing ‘black’ with ‘white’.

2) More Vague Meanings

George Orwell pointed out two characteristics of political discourse in Politics and the English Language, that is, the obsolescence and vagueness of figure of speech. Euphemism, characterized by replacing direct expressions with implicative, obscure and vague ones, plays a quite essential role in demystifying the connotation of political discourse when serving political purposes. Some commonly employed demystifying methods in political euphemism include replacing specific meanings with general ones, replacing hyponyms with superordinates and replacing derogatory meanings with neutral or even commendatory ones. For instance, people often refer to the atomic bombs used in Hiroshima as ‘the gadget’, ‘the device’, ‘the thing’ or other vague meanings. When talking about American army’s invasion into Grenada in 1983, President Reagan was quite dissatisfied with the word ‘invasion’ used by the journalists, instead, he expressed it as ‘a rescue mission’, glorifying their military invasion as their help offer to other countries. Similarly, US air attacks in Vietnam and Libya were called ‘air operation; President Bush also glorifying their military attack to Iraq with some neutral and general expressions such as ‘military operation’ or ‘disarm’ in this speech delivered on the very day they made war against Iraq in 2003.

3) Strong Characteristic of Times

Euphemism is the language reflection of social culture; therefore changes in social development will propel those in language. In each international vicissitude, political euphemism will be booming. Due to US’s important role in international politics as well as its dynamic domestic politics and economy, rich soil is provided for the creation of political euphemism. For example, from US economic decline are ‘recession’, ‘disinflation’ and ‘negative growth’ created, hence giving birth to some euphemistic expressions such as ‘downsize’ or ‘workforce adjustment’. After Watergate Scandal, quite a few euphemistic expressions were produced to hide such political scandal. In addition, military actions are also an extension from politics. It is said that war has brought about not only death and destruction but new euphemistic expressions because they will make death sound less horrible. US Department of Defense named their air attack in Vietnam as ‘air support’ and ‘protective action’, their destruction over Vietnamese villages as ‘pacification program’ and those homeless refugees as ‘ambient non-combat personnel’. Similarly, deaths and injuries caused by their bombardment over other nations were expressed as ‘collateral damage’. It is no wonder that English Teachers’ Council of US once awarded the Best Political Euphemism Award to its Department of Defense. Besides, its characteristic of times can also be reflected in the variation in the signifier of the same objective phenomenon with time. In 1950s, Truman described Korean War as ‘police action’; in 1960s and 1970s, Vietnam War was called ‘Vietnam Conflict’ by US; in 1983, US invasion into Grenada was said to be ‘a rescue mission’ instead of ‘incursion’; its invasion into Panama was also called ‘Operation Just Cause’ and Bush Government said Iraqi War beginning in March, 2003 as ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’. Inside the language system, such constant changes with time evolve from the relationship between the signifier and signified mentioned previously. Although there is no relation between linguistic signs and their signified, people tend to relate euphemism to its signified after it has been used for a period. As a result, the former vagueness and sense of distance disappear and euphemistic color fades away. Consequently, politicians will rack their brains to find alternative expressions

There are a lot of examples of political euphemisms. Let’s examine the following:

1. Freeze is a euphemism for an attempt to contain public expenditure by reducing wages or recruitment.

• Many of those marching from the Embankment to Hyde Park are expected to be public service workers angry over the pay freeze and job losses resulting from the government's drive to eliminate the deficit by cutting public spending.

2. Urban renewal is a euphemism for slum clearance. For example:

• George Osborne, the chancellor, will set out his plans on Saturday for creating at least 10 enterprise zones across Britain, in a scaled down revival of the Thatcher government's urban renewal scheme (guardian.co.uk, Saturday 5 March 2011).

3. Cut is usually used to speak about spending in public sector, for example:

• He claims it is in the gutter that issues like jobs, mortgages and cuts to public services are debated and decided. He insists that negative campaigning works

4. Inflammatory language is a euphemism for hate speech in the articles on election issues. The following example illustrates the importance of the issue of prejudice against newcomers during the period of elections in Britain where inflammatory language is used instead of hate language in order to soften the deplorable immigrants’ situation. For instance:

• Some agreed it was becoming increasingly acceptable for Britons to use the kind of racist and inflammatory language about eastern Europeans that they would never direct at black, Asian or Middle Eastern people (guardian.co.uk, 29 April 2010).

5. Humanitarian intervention is a euphemism referring to military invasion or “dropping bombs on poor people“.

• It said the UN allowed "humanitarian intervention" in some circumstances, but such was not the case in Iraq, and that it would be very difficult to rely on earlier UN resolutions approving the use of force against Saddam extrajudicial execution is when the state kills someone without proper due process. Extrajudicial executions are almost universally considered as a human rights violation.

 

6. Undocumented worker is one of a host of euphemisms for people in the U.S. who do not fit the definition of a resident alien or a citizen. In other words, it is a euphemism for an illegal alien. For instance:

• The failed policy of the Labour and Conservative parties of trying to deport more than 700,000 undocumented workers at a cost of £11,000 per person will cost billions, while a regularisation would net the exchequer more than £1bn in taxes, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research.

The usage of this euphemism performs a taboo function because it forbidden to live and work illegally in another country and all undocumented workers have to submit to a rigorous process to convert to legal status or face immediate deportation. The euphemism in this case helps to avoid a taboo topic of working illegally.

7. Pro-choice is a euphemism for supporting abortion, for instance:

• The Liberal Democrat science spokesman is strongly pro-choice and was supported by Ben Goldacre for his staunchly scientific views (guardian.co.uk, 7 May 2010).

Abortion is the termination of the life of the unborn child in the womb. Pro-choicers would say that the child is not a child but a fetus or a blastocyst which are descriptions of children in the early stages of development. In order to avoid this controversial issue of a very grave sin and disfavour of those having the opposite views, politicians choose the euphemism pro-choice. This euphemism serves a taboo function because an abortion itself is a taboo topic by nature and expressing your views in favour of this issue is even a greater taboo.

8. Protective custody, secure facility, and correctional facility are euphemisms for a prison. The negative associations related to a prison are covered up with the help of the usage of these euphemisms. The examples below show the usage of the euphemisms:

• MI5 took one of Gerry Adams' personal drivers into protective custody yesterday after the man, Roy McShane, was unmasked as a British agent (guardian.co.uk, 9 February 2008).

• Well, if that's true, then the entire House of Commons should be moved to a secure facility, forthwith (guardian.co.uk, 19 November 2010).

 

9. To close loopholes is a euphemism for increasing taxes. In the example the euphemism performs a covering up function as politicians find it very difficult and inconvenient to speak about tax increases because it usually causes people’s dissatisfaction and anger. That is the reason wht they prefer the euphemism to close loopholes instead:

• The government is closing a loophole that allows private providers to be paid more than NHS providers for the same work

 

The usage of euphemisms it is characteristic of political texts which imply that politicians cover up the true nature of political events, deceiving the public with nice-sounding words. The articles on political party issues and politicians contain the vast majority of political euphemisms which may imply that politicians are strongly inclined to use euphemistic language when discussing various issues within the political parties or giving speeches. On the contrary, articles on civil and public services policy showed the lowest number of political euphemisms which may imply that politicians tend to speak quite explicitly on these subjects.

 

References:

1. Allan, K., Burridge, K.1991. Euphemism and Dysphemism.Oxford University Press.
2. Galperin, I.R. 1977. Stylistics. Second edition, revised. Moscow “Higher School”.
3. Holder, R.W. 2002. How Not to Say What You Mean A Dictionary of Euphemisms.
4. SamoŠkaite, L. 2011.  21st Century Political Euphemisms in English Newspapers