EUPHEMISMS, A CHALLENED MARKET

Let’s say you’re selling some fake flowers. Do you call yourself a fake-flower seller? Of course not; you’re a floral marketer, artificial flower division. Now look at your

product – quite beautiful, petals made of silk or whatever – and you ask yourself, “Why artificial?” That’s a word that turns buyers off. You brood about that, and come up with a fresh-as-a-daisy answer: You’ll create a market for permanent flowers. That not only lends longivity to your produce, but it also knocks the noxious weeds turned out in hothouses and pesticide-ridden, inorganic, fertilizer-driven gardens as temporary flowers.

That’s the art of euphemism, from the Greel eu -“good” and pheme, “speech”. And it’s been gaining speed ever since environmentalists were able to transform the damn jungle into the glorious rain forest where you can get wetlands fever.

No newspaper can be held responsible, however, for the prose prettification in its advertising. If you’re appealing to a snooty clientele, you hate to use the word sale; nice stores don’t have sales. If it’s cheap but it hasn’t been marked down you call it a special purchase. Even the most innocent words, when they take on a taint, are quickly euphemized. The Miss America contest, eager to shed any hint of royalism, now forbids the use of reign to denote the period in which here-she-comes holds the title; her once-reign is now a year of service. No longer need Shakespeare’s Edmund, in King Lear, cry, “Now , gods, stand up for bastards!” As Ben Watterberg has written of those born on the wrong side of the blanket: “It was once called bastardy. Then illigetamacy.Then out-of-wedlock birth. And now, frequently, wholly sanitized, nonmarital birth.” (He left out love child.)

“Do you do euphemisms?” writes Ben Bradlee, The Washington Post’s vice-president at large. He cited a broadcast by Peter Jennings of ABC when Yasser Arafat’s plane was missing: “ if something has befallen him in a terminal way…” Because the word lying is off-putting to some, we have seen some prettification under oath. Oliver North denied lying to the Congress, but admitted he had “provided input which differed radically from the truth”. And Roger le Locataire notes from Ponders End London, that British officials caught telling haf-thruths or otherwise deceiving the court admit that they have been economical with the truth. In politics, the Clinton administration has made it linguistics policy to refer to the taxes necessitated by its health plan as premiums, which most people associate with insurance policies. Others say that if the payment is mandatory, it’s a taxt, which has become a politically dirty word. Almost as dirty as guns. When Richard Nixon came out with “Guns are an abomination,” advocates for unrestricted sale of the things that shoot bullets searched for a euphemism. A reader of a Minneapolis city magazine Mpls.St.Paul, wrote to the editor to assert that “thousands have saved themselves, contrary to the myth of the danger of a home-protection weapon. Jason Zweig of Forbes magazine objects to this euphemism: “I don’t think it can transform a gun into a mom-and-apple-pie product. You can call a bullet a criminal-impairment projectile, but that will never blind the mind’s eye to the ferocious furrowing of metal through flesh and bone.”

147 Indirectly, this artile touches upon another linguistic and socio-cultural problem colloquially referred to as PC. What do you think the letters stand for?

Peace Corps

147a Writing