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By JAMES J. KILPATRICK
Seventy years ago, give or take a year, I made a chance remark to my mother. I said Aunt Eva was sweating. Mother gently reproved me.
“No , dear,” she said . “Horses sweat. Men perspire. Byt ladies merely glow.”
I thought of this semantic distinction a few weeks ago when Crown Publishers sent me galleys of Hugh Rawson’s updated Dictionary of Euphemisms and Other Doubletalk. Rawson is the undisputed top authority on euphemisms. His book is a browser’s delight.
A euphemism is “the substitution of an agreeable or inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant.” English speech contains hundreds, probably thousands of them, both positive and negative.
Positive euphemisms inflate and magnify. A garbage truck becomes a sanitation truck; a doorman becomes an access controller. Negative euphemisms deflate and minimize. Thus a prostitute becomes a “lady of the evening,” and adultery slips away as “an extramarital affair.”
Because I believe most euphemisms sin against clarity, I try to avoid them. But not always. Depending entirely on one’s audi
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