Euphemism | Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for the ‘Euphemism’ Category

The perils of euphemism

January 6, 2013

Michael Quinion returned yesterday to his weekly World Wide Words column (#813, 1/5/13) after a month’s absence, offering us (in the “Sic!” section, on errors and infelicities of all kinds) this entertaining item:

The London Mail online was visited on [December 14th] from New Zealand by John Neave, who found this report: “He told Cardiff Crown Court that he suffers from ‘sexomnia’ and has a history of trying to sleep with partners while asleep.”

What makes this funny is the juxtaposition of euphemistic sleep ‘have sex(ual relations) with’ and literal asleep, producing an effect similar to oxymoron.

And as a bonus we get the technical term sexsomnia (in the spelling variant sexomnia, orthographically recognizing the phonological reduction of medial /ss/, with one /s/ from sex and one from the base somnia, to a single /s/).

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Posted in Ambiguity, Combining forms, Euphemism, Morphology | 3 Comments »

Morning erections

January 5, 2013

ADS-L was enlivened yesterday by this piece of news from Utah, reported in many publications, here reproduced by the San Jose Mercury-News from a Cimaron Neugebauer article in the Salt Lake Tribune on the 4th:

‘Morning Glory Road’ deemed too lewd for Utah neighborhood

Lehi, Utah — A technology company has successfully petitioned the Lehi City Council to change the name of Morning Glory Road, after arguing that the term has lewd connotations that could be bad for business.

Xactware Solutions Inc., which is expanding its business into Lehi’s Traverse Mountain area, made a request last month to change the name of the road to Morning Vista Road.

While morning glory is the name of a flowering plant, a company representative pointed out to city officials that it is also used as a slang term for a man’s erection. He argued that the sexual definition of the word could become too prominent in the minds of consumers who see Xactware’s Morning Glory Road address.

“We never knew about the ulterior definitions until that came to light a little while ago,” said Jonathan Gardner, project director of Traverse Mountain Commercial Venture, about 20 miles south of Salt Lake City.

A good bit of head-scratching ensued about the sexual sense of morning glory ‘morning wood, morning erection’, which was unfamiliar to (apparently) everyone on the list, but turns out to have an existence beyond places like Urban Dictionary — although it seems to be recent and looks like a euphemism (using an existing innocuous expression with morning as its first element) that has almost immediately become contaminated by the sense of the expression it was designed to avoid, as is the unfortunate fate of so many euphemisms.

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Posted in Euphemism, Figurative language, Gender and sexuality, Metaphor | 3 Comments »

Commando no more

December 12, 2012

[TMI Warning: The following posting contains information, opinion, or reflection that some readers might find uncomfortably or unwelcomely personal, private, or intimate in topic or content: too much information, as the saying goes. As a general observation, I’m willing to go almost anywhere in my postings, including some places that some readers don’t want to go.]

When I went into the hospital for my hip replacement operation, I was told to bring loose-fitting clothes. The instructions could have been clearer, but I suspect the medical staff didn’t want to alarm us about how limited and difficult my movements were going to be (they’re really focused on being optimistic and encouraging). I did come prepared with boxer shorts in a generous size (bought specially for this purpose; I’ve been a briefs guy for many decades), but it hadn’t occurred to me that jeans — or, in fact, any ordinary pants or trousers — would be an almost impossible ordeal to get on and off. On the other hand, I’d been living with high-class slippers, very easy to get on and off, as shoes for some time (note on them in a moment). In the end, I left the hospital in the boxers and slippers, plus a t-shirt and a bathrobe. T-shirt, boxers, and slippers became my basic costume for a while, and visitors entered into an unspoken agreement to think of the boxers as short pants instead of underwear.

Viewed that way, I had already gone commando, in pants with no underwear. Then came the sweatpants, and I definitely went commando.

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Posted in Clipping, Clothing, Euphemism, Idioms, Metaphor, My life, Underwear | 7 Comments »

Brief mention: More wiping

December 2, 2012

In an earlier note, I looked at bath tissue as a substitute for toilet paper or bathroom tissue, both of those serving as euphemisms for some more direct reference to material for wiping the anus clean of feces. Bath tissue is sufficiently indirect that it can take some work to understand out of context.

Since then I’ve moved into a more complex world of wiping, thanks to my not having showers as the grand scheme of bodily hygiene. (My shower is a glass enclosure over a tub, and it’s a big step into the shower — way too big for someone with a new hip implant . So it’s sponge baths and other workarounds.)

There are two needs here: anal wiping again, now to be managed without a shower cleanup; and general body washing (including rinsing and drying), which would ordinarily be done (in the absence of showering) with soap and a washcloth at a sink or basin, This stuff eventually gets a lot easier, but at the beginning the project is much like infant care or elder care, and the cleaning products needed are pretty much the same.

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Euphemism | 5 Comments »

Brief mention: euphemism

October 11, 2012

During this time when I’m pretty much housebound, I’ve taken to having more and more things delivered. Just ordered my second delivery from Safeway, which includes toilet paper. But it took me a little while to find the stuff on the on-line inventory. Under “paper products”, clearly, but then what?

The only subcategory I couldn’t immediately identify was bath tissue, so that pretty much had to be it.

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Euphemism | 4 Comments »

Brief mention: our modest medicos

October 7, 2012

From the materials for Dr. James Hartford’s presentation in a seminar on hip (and knee) replacement at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation on Thursday (an information-packed two hours), in a set of slides on “Common Questions?”, slide 4:

How long do I maintain hip precautions? [things like not crossing your legs] 6 weeks

When can I play golf again? As soon as you’re comfortable (3-8 wks; Dr. Hartford had more detailed imstructions)

When can I drive? 4 weeks

When can I have relations? 4 weeks

That’s relations, a modesty truncation of sexual relations. My daughter and I did wonder if non-native speakers would understand the euphemism.

No one asked about it, though I’m curious here, as in many other contexts, about what counts as sexual relations. I can see why intercourse would be problematic. But what what about masturbation? I’ll have to check with the doc.

Posted in Euphemism, Language and medicine, Language of sex, Truncation | 3 Comments »

Follow-up: The A-Word

August 14, 2012

A follow-up to yesterday’s posting about avoidance of taboo initials — especially F — in the New York Times: titles of books, plays, movies, musical albums, etc. present a special challenge to the NYT, in that indirect allusions or paraphrases (the paper’s usual scheme) are extremely difficult to manage (since they do violence to the titles); this is a rare occasion on which the paper will resort to asterisking, dashing, or underlining-out the entire offending word.

For his latest book, Geoff Nunberg has thoughtfully selected a main title that averts the difficulty for the Times, moving the offending item to the subtitle.

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Posted in Euphemism, Taboo language and slurs | 3 Comments »

Mickey Mouse in the old days

June 24, 2012

Via Jen Dewalt in Grapefeed, this story, “Back in the day, Mickey Mouse attempted suicide and fought opium smugglers” (by Cyriaque Lamar on the 22nd), beginning:

Intrepid readers will remember that one time Mickey Mouse and Goofy espoused the salubrious effects of amphetamine-laced soft drinks.

The truth is, that helium-voiced cartoon rodent weathered many a dubiously family-friendly moment during his early years.

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Posted in Euphemism, Linguistics in the comics, Taboo language and slurs | 9 Comments »

experiencing an employment loss

June 22, 2012

Back on the 13th, a NYT story, “New Orleans Struggles With Latest Storm, Newspaper Layoffs” by Campbell Robertson, with this passage:

In New Orleans and across the state of Alabama on Tuesday, as part of a basic restructuring of the news business at four papers owned by Advance Publications, scores of employees walked into one-on-one meetings and walked out 10 minutes later with severance packages. They included advertising employees, copy editors, press operators, crime reporters, photographers and graphic artists.

The Web site al.com, the online site for The Birmingham News, The Huntsville Times and The Mobile Press-Register, reported that 400 employees in Alabama would “experience an employment loss.”

The Birmingham News had a newsroom of 102 going into Tuesday; by the end of the day 61 were gone. The Times-Picayune laid off more than 200 people, or nearly a third of its overall staff.

I’ll say a bit about the substance of the story, but first a note on the remarkably indirect euphemism for be laid off: experience an employment loss.

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Posted in Euphemism, Technical and ordinary language, The media | 1 Comment »