On Euphemisms
Notes on euphemisms
Abstract
The purpose of this work is to reveal some general aspects of the English euphemisms, along with short notes on their history and their diachronical evolution. At the end of the paper, there are sketched the origin and evolution of some commonly used euphemisms.
The origin of the word is traced-back from the Gk. euphemismos "use of a favorable word in place of an inauspicious one," from euphemizein "speak with fair words," from eu- "good" + pheme "speaking," from phanai "speak". In ancient Greece, it was the superstitious avoidance of words of ill-omen during religious ceremonies, or substitutions such as Eumenides "the Gracious Ones" for the Furies. In Eng.lish, a rhetorical term at first; broader sense of "choosing a less distasteful word or phrase than the one meant" is first attested 1793.
Euphemism and historical linguistics
Historical linguistics has revealed traces of taboo deformations in many languages. Several are known to have occurred in Indo-European, including the original Indo-European words for bear (*rktos), wolf (*wlkwos), and deer (originally, hart). In different Indo-European languages, each of these words has a difficult etymology because of taboo deformations - a euphemism was substituted for the original, which no longer occurs in the language. An example is the Slavic root for bear-*medu-ed-, which means "honey eater".
In some languages of the Pacific, using the name of a deceased chief is taboo. Since people are often named after everyday things, this leads to the swift development of euphemisms. These languages have a very high rate of vocabulary change.
Classification of euphemisms
Many euphemisms fall into one or more of these categories:
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