the ‘middle class politeness criterion’ in Allan and Burridge ). This sort of ‘sensitive handling’ employs a type of good etiquette gauge by which is determined the X-phemistic value of an expression without reference to the context of use (cf. Similarly, those who compile dictionaries of euphemisms and dysphemisms, such as Ayto (1993) and Green (1996), base their collections on the prejudiced social attitudes to the situation in which they believe a given expression is uttered. The Encarta World English Dictionary recognizes three degrees of offensiveness: ‘insulting’, ‘offensive’, and ‘taboo’. Modern dictionaries also treat expressions as if they were inherently dysphemistic when they indicate offensive connotations of particular entries. No context was provided yet, participants were clear about the severity of these words and the researchers were able to put together a broad topography of swearwords across all groups. Milwood-Hargrave is a British survey where participants were asked to respond to the perceived ‘strength’ of twenty-eight swearwords. However, it would ignore reality to pretend that ordinary people do not perceive expressions to be somehow intrinsically X-phemistic: terms for ‘die’ such as pass away and sleep are euphemistic, whereas croak and peg out are not. There is never ‘Everyman’s euphemism’ or ‘Everyman’s dysphemism’. Given there is such complexity and variety of opinions and attitudes, we are unlikely to ever find uniformity of judgement between speakers of even very similar social backgrounds. X-phemism (the union set of these ‘phemisms’) is primarily determined from evaluating expressions within the particular context in which they are uttered. Introduction – the functions of euphemismġI need first to explain my use of the labels euphemism, dysphemism and orthophemism. As always I am very grateful for his input. Many thanks to Keith Allan for casting his expert eye over this paper. And since personal names form such a special case of word taboo, some consideration will also be given to the ancient and modern perspective of naming.
This paper reviews the various communicative functions of euphemisms and the different linguistic strategies that are used in their creation, focusing on the linguistic creativity that surrounds the topic of ‘old age’ in Modern English (Shakespeare’s sixth and seventh ages). This is why these words are so unstable and why they are so powerful. When it comes to taboo words, speakers behave as if there were a very real connection between the physical shape of words and their taboo sense.
Word taboo plays perpetual havoc with the methods of historical comparative linguistics, even undermining one of the cornerstones of the discipline – the arbitrary nature of the word. They provide an emotive trigger for word addition, word loss, phonological distortion and semantic shift. No matter which human group we look at, past or present, euphemism and its counterpart dysphemism are powerful forces and they are extremely important for the study of language change.
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