Euphemisms: Linguistic Transmutation

Sure, euphemisms allow us to talk about something unpleasant or taboo without actually invoking the dreaded word or words -- but what else is going on? In this episode of the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast, Robert and Joe explore the linguistic power of euphemisms to alter and transform the tone or meaning of everyday communication.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert.
I want to talk about my favorite scene in the
movie bram Stoker's Dracula, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Okay, well,

(00:26):
there's never a bad time to discuss, uh that that
particular interpretation of Dracula. It is a great one, isn't it.
It's like horrible, but it's also great. It has some
wonderful design in it. I love the suit of armor,
oh yeah, yeah, and I love some of the painted
backdrops and stuff. But there's a great scene where so
you know the basic story of Dracula. These characters are

(00:47):
in I think late Victorian England and Dracula, Count Dracula
comes to England from Transylvania and begins feeding on the
locals in England. And uh, there is the character Van Helsing,
the Van vampire slayer, a man of great wisdom. And
in the bram Stoker's Dracula France Ford couple of version,
he has played by Anthony Hopkins in a wonderfully weird,

(01:09):
hyperactive performance. Uh. And there's a scene where the main
character's friend Lucy has been turned into a vampire by
Count Dracula, and Van Helsing and his associates have just
come back from slaying the vampire version of their friend
Lucy and the character Mina Harker played in the movie
by win Owner writer. She asks how did Lucy die?

(01:31):
Was she in great pain? And Anthony Hopkins as Van
Helsing says, yes, she was in great pain. Then we
cut off our head, drove a stake through her heart
and then burned it. And then she found peace. And
I always love that because of the last line at
the end there and then she found peace. Yeah, everything
else is thoroughly non euphemistic. It's pretty straightforward. These are

(01:52):
the steps we took to to tear her corpse apart
to to kill her her undead uh unnatural life. Right,
But then you have to end it with a euphemism,
so they they have these terms ready at hand. She
found peace, she passed on, she went to a better place.

(02:13):
These are the the friendly terms for death. He could
have just finished as he began by saying and then
she died screaming, but instead he uses the euphemism and
then she found peace. And it's a great contrast. That's
it's why it's such a wonderful comic moment. But it
makes you aware of the absurdity of the euphemisms that

(02:34):
we use in everyday language. Yeah, I feel like in
researching this episode, we both had to do a lot
of self examination regarding our own use of euphemisms. Uh,
you know just how ubiquitous euphemistic language is. It's everywhere,
It's I bet it's half of all the talk you
do now. Of course, the concept of a euphemism is

(02:57):
if you're not familiar with the word, it just means
using a friendlier or more acceptable term to express an
idea that, for some reason is taboo or uncomfortable. Yeah,
it's interesting thinking about it in terms of having a
four and a half year old in the house, because
he he does not have a really a great use

(03:18):
of euphemisms. Yet when he's very blunt, right when he'll
be eating dinner and he'll say I need to go poop,
I'll be right back. He'll he'll even lay out a
detailed plan. I'm gonna go poop and wash my hands,
and I'm gonna come back, and then I'm gonna fish
eater And wouldn't it be great if we could do
that during dinner party? Yeah? No, no, like if an
adult did that, you would just think they'd lost their

(03:40):
mind or just we're the most uncouth first and imaginable, right,
But but a child is completely free of this. But yeah,
we would use euphemism. We would say I need to
go use the restroom, I'm going to go make use
of the laboratory, or maybe we visit the water closet, yeah, like,
or even I'm going to step out it. Yeah, I'm

(04:00):
I'm gonna Well that that's a weird. I've never heard
anyone use that I'm gonna step out, Like, what are
you going to do if you're gonna step out? I
don't know. I mean obviously something you don't want to
talk about. Um, Yeah, I tend to fall back on
I'm gonna go visit the restroom or I'm gonna use
the restroom and I'll be right back visit like you're
gonna have some quality time. Well, I'm keeping it vague
as to what. I'm not going to give you the

(04:21):
particulars of what's going to happen. Maybe I'm just washing
my hands, maybe I need to blow my nose, might
just stare in the mirror without blinking. Yeah, but I'm
not gonna say I'm gonna go poop and then I
will return. I bet there's a lot of stuff when
you have a kid in the house that you have
to do euphemistically that you you're used to talking more bluntly,
maybe with your spouse or partner, but but once a

(04:44):
kid comes along, you can't say everything the way you
used to. Well, it's interesting. There's a lot of there's
a lot of back and forth too with kids regarding
especially euthanisms regarding the human body, because some parents will
we'll fall into this habit of using like cutes here
less uh less accurate terminology for parts of the body,

(05:08):
particularly genitalia, which I always find creepy when I hear
no offense to parents who do that. I'm not actually
judging you, and that's just my instinctual reaction hearing like
pp and stuff. It always sounds like, yeah, yeah, we
try not to do that in our household. I mean
that everyone everyone can, you know, do their own thing
by all means, but yeah, we try and say, all right, penis, testicles,

(05:31):
um et cetera. Because you know, I feel it's important
for them to have an accurate understanding of their body
and then to be able to describe their body, uh seriously,
to say, you know a physician. Yeah, if they needed
to talk to a doctor, they would need the correct terms.
But but that's an area where in parenting circles people

(05:51):
kind of go on your arguments on both sides. Do
you do you ever find yourself like wanting to curse
in front of the child, but you have to find
an other word. Oh yeah, all the time. Sometimes I
don't find that other word. Um uh this morning, even
driving through traffic, and my son reminded me, said, they
can't hear you. I guess the other drivers cannot hear me.

(06:14):
That is a perceptive kid. Yeah, But but I try.
I do try and use certain euphemisms or just it's
almost easier for me to just come up with a
nonsense word, so referring to other drivers as dumbledoors or
calling them crab drivers or something like that. Crab drivers
good because they're kind of scuttling around back and forth
right a side and stead of going in straight lines. Uh.

(06:34):
Like I find that easier to do because sometimes it's
difficult to make a euphemism stick because if I'm if
I'm really irritated with another driver, my brain really wants
to use, uh, the the F word or or the
or the S word, or one of these more actually
profane words from a vocabulary, and there's something about a

(06:56):
watered down version of it just will not suit. Yeah,
it seems to to have a power, almost a magical power,
And I think maybe that goes back to some deeply
rooted part of the cursed tradition in our brains, where
you know, thousands of years ago, somebody issues a curse,
they think that that has power. I think it's actually
doing something. Gang is not gonna not gonna got not

(07:19):
gonna do. It's not gonna suit. Fudge is not gonna work.
So euphemisms in our house, Uh, my wife Rachel and
I get a lot of enjoyment out of talking about
our dog in un euphemistic terms when people normally would so.
One example, when our dog's legs and jaws are jerking
in his sleep, you know he's having a little doggie dreams.

(07:40):
I think many dog owners would be inclined to say, oh,
he's dreaming about chasing something. But we would say, oh,
he's dreaming about killing, which he is. He's definitely dreaming
about killing little animals. Yeah, that's that's that, that's true. Yeah,
I guess I do a certain amount of that with
our our our pet as well. I'll give one more
example though, about about raising a child and euphemisms, is

(08:03):
that sometimes you still do not succeed in really driving
home the names for things, and without the proper term,
sometimes the like the children's name for it is going
to be totally even more unsuitable. So I don't think
I drove home properly. You know what the anus is

(08:25):
to my son. And so one day we had some
people guests to the house and this is something he
hadn't even met before, but he walked outside, just got
it from the nap, and he probably announces, quote, uh,
it itches where poop comes out on my bum and uh.
And I think, arguably, like this, this is a more
uncouth statement. Grantedies four and a half, so nobody cares,
but still it would be more accurate to say my

(08:47):
anus itches. Right. But in a way what he said
was euphemism. Really it's an anti euphemism, and we'll get
into that in a in a bit the the euphemism
is actually cuter there in the situation where a kid
says it. If it's true the kid had said anus,
that might have been weirder. Yeah, But if an adult
had said it it itches on my bum where poop
comes out, then that, you know, you would call the

(09:09):
authorities exactly. Okay, So, uh, let's zoom in on the
concept of the euphemism and try to figure out what
it does, what is its role in language apart from
the obvious. Now we we did say that it's essentially
a nice word. It's a word that takes the place
of a word that, for some reason is inappropriate offensive. Uh,

(09:32):
something people don't want to say or think about. Maybe
that conjures up too concreteive an image. Yeah, I mean,
on the surface of things, it's don't say that, say this,
But of course it's it's more than that. A euphemism
has the power to alter the meaning of the word,
or at least the spirit and tone of the word. Right.
It's like a black and white image versus a colorized image.
Euphemisms allow us to colorize our our linguistic choices to

(09:57):
a certain extent, and I think we can all think
of various examples where a euphemism simultaneously makes a word
less offensive and and yet creep here at the same time,
such as many of these genitalia euphemisms that we've been
discussing exactly yeah pp hearing an adult say it, it's creepy.
It even rhymes yeah. I would say most genitalia euphemisms, uh,

(10:19):
kind of sound like that they have this this this
vibe of being at one point that they're deflecting us
from the thing we're talking about, and yet colorize it
in a way that is distasteful. Okay, So there are
a bunch of different ways that you can come up
with the euphemism, right like you you can put it
together in several ways. There's a word that people have
instinctually felt somehow they want to start avoiding saying, but

(10:43):
they still need the concept in everyday language. You still
have to be able to refer to the thing the
word refers to somehow, So you've got to come up
with a different word. So where do these different words
come from? Well, you can of course really go down
the rabbit hole figuring out what sort of euphemisms are
doing what. But here are some of the basic classifications
to consider. There's a term of foreign origin, okay, like

(11:07):
a dairy air or copulation urination, you're using a more
elegant and uh and in foreign term for what you're
talking about. In English. A lot of times the euphemisms
kind of come from Latin constructions more so than from
the Anglo Saxon constructions, where the the short straightforward word

(11:28):
sounds kind of rude and concrete, and that the Latin
origin words sounds more abstract and less like it less
it's less likely to conjure an image. Another example is abbreviations,
for instance, s O B or food bar. These are
both examples where we we simply abbreviate a A a

(11:49):
phrase that would otherwise be offensive to some right, and
I guess in most cases you would still consider the
abbreviation somewhat offensive, but maybe less so. Yeah. Uh. The
one I like you made the note of this, but
I like the idea of using really vague abstractions such
as doing it, doing it or um. The source I

(12:12):
was looking at mentioned like situation, like just referring to
the such and such situation. One that always has annoyed
me is the situation the situation room, like what what
situation is the room for? Is it a war room?
Because if it's a war room, let's call it a
war room. Is it an emergency room? Is it let's
let's call it what it is? The situation room could

(12:33):
be about anything, Okay. There would also be the concept
of just saying that you don't want to say a thing,
essentially like unmentionables. Yes, he who should not be named
right lord Voldemort? Uh? And then there of course mispronunciations
like freaking or god. I guess is gosh darn it?

(12:54):
One is replacing God with gosh? Does that work? I
guess it could be like go old? Aren't gold? Aren't?
That would be one? Yeah? And then their plays on abbreviation,
which I really hadn't thought much of, but bull roar
is one that we actually used recently in talking about
BS or just to go ahead and bleet meum a bullet, right,

(13:19):
But I don't think I've ever used barbecue sauce. I
saw that one listed as well. Where did you see that?
It was? In one of the papers so that we
were looking at they mentioned barbecue. So I would like
to hear from anyone who who says, oh, that's just
a load of barbecue sauce. Barbecue, I've never heard that.
It must be a regional, regional thing. What kind of
barbecue sauce, especially if it's regional North Carolina, South Carolina,

(13:39):
I don't know. Or beasting. Beasting would be a good one.
Oh is that actually used? No? I just made that up.
I was trying to think, what what, what could you
that's even that even has some of the same consonants
in it? Yeah? Um, how about malarkey or maybe malarkey?
Is malarkey actually more offensive in in its origin? And
we're just it's one of these things where we don't
know what it means anymore. I have no idea where

(14:01):
it comes from. It would be horrible to go look
that up later and find out it's a deeply offensive term. Yeah,
and you know, I feel like that happens a time
or two as well. We we have something we think
is is a euphemism, but in reality we're just using
a far more offensive term than not that fewer people
are familiar with. Okay, But so when you use euphemisms,

(14:23):
how however you form the new phrase or the new word,
you're essentially doing maybe three different kinds of things, right, Yeah,
when you bust out euphemism, you may be employing what
is called circumlocution to to speak around that which cannot
be said. Yeah, circumlocution, And that's something we often use
in a non euphemistic way to like we use it

(14:45):
when we're speaking a language we're not very familiar with.
If you've ever tried to speak another language, you often
don't have the word for a thing, so instead you circumlocute,
You say a bunch of things that are sort of
explaining the concept of the word to try to get
to it. But this would be a case where you
do the same thing, not because you don't have the word,

(15:05):
but because you don't want to use the word. Yeah.
And another example would be a taboo deformation. So we're
just we're altering the spelling or pronunciation of of that
which cannot be said. So go fudge yourself, um you
mother effort. That would be an example of of the
use of taboo defamation or gold arn't, Yeah, gold arn't.

(15:27):
We're just take like thinking, think of the obscenity as
this clay object, and we're just wrenching it into a
less profane shape. But we still know what its original
shape was it's still it's still echoes that form enough
for us to use it, albeit in a blunted form. Yeah,
and I guess the other main thing would be sort
of robbing the word of its power to conjure imagery. Yeah,

(15:51):
double speak, right, Uh, making neutral the awful. I think
one of the best examples of this is to say, uh,
the enemy combatant was new traalized, which sounds far nicer
than we We shot Rolf to death and his his
family will be without him. Now. You know, Rolf was
hit with an explosive that resulted in complete body de defragmentation,

(16:15):
which I guess is that'd be sort of that's kind
of a euphanism as well, right, but defragmentation, what would
it be? Rolf was hit by an explosion that severed
many arteries. Yes, but you know it's not that funny.
I don't know why I'm laugh No, no, but it's
kind of getting it as we try to to dance
around Rolf's death, and he even discussed more accurately what

(16:36):
happened to Rolf. Are some things in life almost like
too dreadful, Like there's there's no way that language, at
least brief language can accurately describe something that is that horrible.
I don't know. I mean, it's interesting to look at
the general categories of things that we have euphemisms for.
It's not just arbitrary. It's like, it's not like we

(16:58):
just have euphemisms for any thing. We have euphemisms usually
for terms having to do with the inevitable processes of
the human body, like like elimination of waste, uh, sex
and death. Those those are the big things that you
have euphemisms for, but also for culturally sensitive issues like

(17:19):
you know, for names of marginalized groups that are discriminated
against or something like that. Yeah, and uh, you know,
as well as the way these things are shadowed. And
certainly as there's a whole area of business euphemism to
discussed as discussed as well. Oh absolutely, Yeah, of course,
we have a number of different euphemisms to to to

(17:42):
refer to firing someone, which is kind of the the
workplace version of death. Right. Yeah, we have. For instance,
you may have heard about layoffs, downsizing, right, sizing, that's
like that's a euphemism on top of a euphemism like downsizing.
That's you know, we're not downsizing, we're right sizing. We're
just we're just making the organization the correct size for

(18:02):
what we're doing here. Head count adjustment or head count
reduction uh an r I F or reduction enforce a realignment.
These are also so fabulous, wonderful terms that allow UH
management to do horrible things to people's lives. The wordout
feeling bad about it. The worst is let go. It's

(18:24):
like you're free. Oh yeah, we we had we had
to let we had to let you go. You should
be thinking us, I think, maybe more than anywhere else
I go in in my life, the business world is
absolutely built out of euphemism. So I think a reason
for this might be that the business relationship is essentially

(18:44):
a cutthroat relationship most of the time. If employers can
scam customers or employees out of another nickel and get
away with it and keep making money, they will do
it most of the time, and vice versa. You know,
every everybody in the business relationship is is trying to
get an extra nickel and and give as little as
they can for it. But at the same time, customers

(19:07):
and employers and employees interact with one another all the time.
You have to see your employer on a regular basis.
I mean most people do. Uh. So they want to
have pleasant relationships with the people they interact with. So
you kind of live in this state of denial about
the heartless, cutthroat principle at the foundation of your work relationships.

(19:28):
And it's weird trying to be friendly with your boss
when you're thinking about the fact that your boss could
fire you at any time, and in some places, for
any reason. So we we sort of pack our business
lives with euphemisms to avoid thinking about this cutthroat reality.
In addition to the euphemisms for firing. One thing I
was thinking about was, Robert, have you ever noticed that,

(19:48):
at least in my experience, maybe in years two, businesses
seem to never want to talk about quote money. Yeah,
so maybe I'm imagining this, but it seems like money
it's always removed to one higher level of abstraction, like
revenue or returns or something like that. Uh. And it's
as if talking about money directly would reveal that the

(20:12):
whole enterprise is kind of tacky at its core, or
you know, not only revenue but rev rev share, Like
that's the term that is thrown around a lot in
our industry. Now, and yet you talk about rev share,
then it's just an item on on a sheet. But
if you say I want you to give me more
of some of the money that you're getting for the
thing that I'm making for you so that you can

(20:33):
make money, uh, then it gets a little less tidy. Right.
It's like, why are you making it like that? It's
like you said something really mean when you're just saying
in direct terms what you're talking about. Yeah, I often
think about you know, we we've already studies in terms
of businesses where corporations are essentially psychopaths. I often, and

(20:56):
I often think of it in terms of like artificial
intelligence UM beings, then various cyberpunk stories. So a corporation
is essentially this, this demon, and this demon is bound
by whatever chains of law and UH and policy and
regulations that we can muster to keep it in check.
And then we we sort of handle it with specialized gloves,

(21:19):
often you know, composed of euphemisms that allow us to
handle it and benefit from its presence. But there's no
denying that it's it's horrible demonic nature. A nice analogy,
it's it comes from I guess I read one too
many Warhammer book and in my time, Oh, they have
demon gloves for the corporations. Um, well know they have

(21:41):
actual demons sometimes and they're chained up and they serve
the who is it the witch hunters? Yeah, excellent, Well,
I think we should take a quick break and when
we come back, we're going to talk about some of
the cultural implications of euphemisms. So, yeah, we're talking about

(22:01):
language here. We have multiple languages throughout the world. Every
culture is it kind of emerges from its own linguistic world,
and therefore we have we have different uses of euphemism
in in different languages. We have different uses of euphemism
in just different versions of different languages, different dialects British
English versus American English, and so a lot of our

(22:24):
reference points are going to be English, but uh, it
is worth looking into the use of euphemisms maybe in
other languages too. Yeah, two great examples I think come
from British English and Mandarin Chinese. So the the Economists
ran a great and naturally unattributed article back in um
titled making Murder Respectable, and it runs through a number

(22:46):
of examples of euphemisms that are currently uh or or
sort of previously in use. I think some of the
British ones have fallen out of favor. Did you notice
that nice euphemism they're unattributed, where the real term would
be the author's name is not listed. Yeah, you can
either you would either say the the author is anonymous
or or not credited for their work. But I mean

(23:09):
that's the economist business, a whole separate, separate, separate discussion.
Uh so, Yeah. We have a number of course American euphemisms,
which the the author in this this article points out
that these of course just replaced non offensive words terms
with new non offensive words in terms. We'll get into
the details on this in a bit, but it entails

(23:29):
something that's that's been referred to as the euphemism treadmill
right by the linguist and general scholar Stephen Pinker. Yeah. Yeah, contemporary,
very very much contemporary, still commenting on the world we
find ourselves in today. British euphemisms, on the other hand,
they create quote a pleasant sense of of complicity between

(23:51):
the euphemist and the individual that's listening to the euphemist.
The first few examples that the author rolls outcome from
British o bits, so a drunkard will be described as
as convivial or cheery. That's great. Um, aniphomaniac is uh,
and it has notable vivacity and in in prior times

(24:18):
you would of course encountered a homosexual only as a
quote confirmed bachelor. With all of these, it's almost as
if the person using the euphemism and the person hearing
it are sort of in on a joke together. Yeah, yeah,
there's a And that's something that the author gets into
here too, is you you have to be on it
on the joke to really understand at least proper British,

(24:43):
proper British conversation. You have to know the cues, otherwise
you're gonna have no idea what you're talking about. One
more from the o bit world, though, is that there's
the mysterious burdened by occasional irregularities in his private life
bit like, which is delightfully they like, what what I
assume that means? Scandal scandal ridden life. But that's that's

(25:06):
a lot sharper. So yeah. The author points out that
there are a number of passive cues in sort of
traditional high British conversation, such as incidentally incidentally, Joe. Uh.
This would mean I am now telling you the purpose
of this discussion, even though I'm saying incidentally, as if
this is just an incidental point I want to make,

(25:29):
I'm actually saying, all right, cut all the crap, this
is the real reason we're meeting here today. Another one
that the the author mentions with the greatest respect. With
the greatest respect, Joe, Uh, that means you are mistaken
and silly, which which which seems to be the complete
opposite of what you're literally saying. I can think of

(25:50):
a Southern American equivalent that bless his heart. Bless his heart. Yeah,
he bless his heart. That means sort of the opposite
of what it said. Yeah. I think that's a great example. Now.
The the author of this Economist piece also pointed out
that there are a number of Chinese euphemisms U and these,
like American euphemisms, often stem from squeamishness. It's not proper

(26:11):
to be too direct, especially if you might offend somebody.
So it's this idea of of a polite opacity. So
instead of turning down an invitation, uh, And this might
be like a this can be a really formal invitation,
like you know, a political of a political nature. One
might be told that that something is a boufong bion,

(26:32):
which means not convenient, when that, of course really means
we're not doing that, that's not happening. So it's not
like this is a bad time for me. Can we
reschedule right? It's it's very reminiscent of I imagine everyone
out there has some friend or acquaintance that's very flaky,
very wishy washy about their appointments, who say, hey, do
you want to hang out this week? Let me check

(26:54):
my calendar. Uh, let me see, I'll get back to you,
you know, instead of like sometimes that means sometimes, yeah,
that's that's the thing. And if you didn't if you
didn't know better, you might and you know, you might
have a policy of an official inquiry with with the
Chinese government official and you and you might say, oh,
well it's not convenient, I'll try again tomorrow. But no,

(27:15):
you're not getting the message. It's not convenient, it's not
going to happen. Perhaps ever, Another example is uh is
one might ask for an explanation of something and you
might get buching chu, which means uh, I am not clear,
which just means you're not going to be told like
it basically means I can't tell you that or I

(27:35):
won't tell you that. But uh, it's it's it's casting
that in the guise of why I'm not really clear
on the information, but it also kind of sounds like
I am not clear and that I am not I
am open, I am open. Yeah, So I find it
interests and there examples like this in every language, and
perhaps our listeners out there, if you have particular examples

(27:57):
you're aware of in a tongue that you speak or
have some history with, we'd love to hear those examples.
Oh yeah, I always love hearing the different idioms from
around the world that we get from listeners. One of
my favorites was we heard from a listener and oh,
now I apologize, I can't remember which language it was.
I think it was Swedish or Norwegian or maybe uh,

(28:20):
Scandinavian language, and the expression was it was an expression
that means something is a miss and the term is
there are owls in the moss. I love it. That's great,
there are owls in the moss. That's that's pretty good.
If you're the one who sent that to us, which
I still think about that a lot, Thank you so much. Okay, Well,

(28:41):
for one other arena of of the interaction between culture
and euphemism, I was thinking about what about religious euphemisms,
so I sometimes see, here's just one example. I want
to talk about a few different examples. One of them
is the way some Christians use euphemism to talk about

(29:02):
certain doctrines that they haven't explicitly rejected but obviously aren't
comfortable talking about directly. And one example that I have
encountered before is the Christian doctrine of Hell. Yes, now,
there are many doctrines of Hell, and I don't want
to paint all believers with the same view, but one
common interpretation throughout the history of the Church is the

(29:24):
sort of Dante's Inferno interpretation saying that Dante is more
or less correct after death, people who are non Christians
or people who are unrepentant sinners go to a place
of eternal torture and agony in fire. And some modern
Christians explicitly deny that premise. They just don't believe that
in that or they don't interpret the references to Hell

(29:47):
that way. Right, Yeah, we actually have an older stuff
to bear your Mind episode on this that that goes
through some of the theologies, and I think we have
a we have a list or gallery that I can
link to on the landing page for this episode of
stuff to Bring your Mind dot com. But yeah, you
have everything from this literal interpretation to annihilation theology, which says,
when you die going to hell, is that simply essentially

(30:08):
you are consumed. Your soul is just completely obliterated. Yeah,
you just ceased to be. Yeah. And then, of course,
as you allude to, some some do accept and embrace
it and say explicitly what they mean. You know, hell
is a place of torment, depart from me and everlasting fire.
But there are some people who at least rhetorically seems
stuck in the middle. I hear this fairly often. They

(30:30):
don't reject the doctrine, but they don't want to talk
about it bluntly. So you get phrases that are things
like the the unrighteous or the unbeliever will suffer divine
judgment or something like that. Seem it's euphemistic in nature.
You know, you haven't rejected the belief, but you just
don't want to talk about the particulars of it. That's interesting.

(30:53):
So they're basically they might, for instance, they might believe
in this uh, this sort of torture or u revenge
fantasy of Hell, but they're using the language of annihilation
theology instead as a euphemism for what they actually believe,
or just not being specific about what the judgment entails. Yeah,

(31:14):
I mean, I think there are there are other terms too.
That was the first one that came to my mind.
But it's such a weird area to consider, right, because
so many of these when you're using a euphemism for
you know, your your but you're talking about a thing
that has a definite reality. There's there's nothing subjective. It's
not a doctrine or belief, right, there is an objective,

(31:36):
but there's an objective their objective buttocks. There is an anus.
There's no denying there no there no no no denying
these things. But when you get into Hell, they are
all these discussions. There's there's been, there's a there's a
there's a broad spectrum of theologies regarding its existence or
non existence. I mean, I'm I'm personally of the mind
that whatever your belief about Hell is, you should you

(32:00):
should you should speak clearly about it another type of
religious euphemism, I would say, is motivated by a very
different type of thing. Instead of being uncomfortable with certain
concepts or not wanting to talk about certain things, it
extends from a a perception of holiness or reverence. And

(32:21):
this is the evolution of the name of God in
Judaism throughout history. So it's not that the name of
God has changed so much, or at least not much
in recent history in Judaism, but that at certain points
throughout history, usage of the name has become taboo because
of beliefs about not taking the name of the Lord

(32:43):
in vain. And thus it is required to have a
new word if you want to talk about religious ideas
such as your belief in God without referencing this word,
that you might be using the wrong way. And so
some of my info here is coming from uh book
on Hebrew and Western The Hebrew and Western Christian Name

(33:03):
of God by Robert J. Wilkinson. But in the Hebrew Bible,
the Jewish God has several names. You've got names like
ale and ale yawn uh Eloheim, but the most common
is Yahweh, the four letter word that's often called the
tetragrammaton meaning four letters um. And at a certain point
in the history of Judaism, and generally in that the

(33:25):
Hellenistic period, you know, the Greek Conquest, a taboo on
pronouncing the name emerged. And so, to quote one story
about this origin from the Babylonian talbot, to quote the Greeks,
and that's referring to the Seleucid rulers of the region
at that time decreed that the name of God may
not be spoken aloud. But when the hasman Ians, and

(33:47):
it was a group of Jewish rebels, grew in strength
and defeated them, they decreed that the name of God
be used even in contracts. And an example of this
might be something like, by the name of Yahweh, I
will paint your chicken coop if you give me a
tray of corn money, um and so. But then continuing
from the Talmud, when the rabbis heard about this, they said,

(34:09):
tomorrow this person will pay his debt and the contract
will be thrown on a garbage heap. So they forbade
its use in contracts. So it wasn't the use of
the name that was necessarily inherently wrong. It was just
that using it in this way for sort of everyday
purposes made it vulnerable to accidental defilement. Okay, so you

(34:31):
have in a sence, you have a very secular use
of divine terminology and uh, and it's not proper to
throw that around, right, to just make up a contract
with the name of God, and that you'd end up
throwing in the trash. It's like if you were what's
the the the Clive Barker film where you say that
the name three times and he shows up candy Man,

(34:52):
candy man. So it's like candy man. Can't You don't
want to say candy man all the time because he
will show up and start killing people, and you've got
a limited number of times you can invoke that. Yeah,
So we need to have another name for candy Man.
You call him like, you know, sweet guy, sweet guy. Yeah.
But then after a while, like there's still a candy
Man is just so magical and so potent that he's

(35:14):
going to creep into that term as well and start
popping up when you say that words. So you gotta
come up with another one. Yeah. But so anyway, going on,
in the same spirit of avoiding accidental defilements, some Jews
throughout history have avoided saying the tetragrammaton name out loud,
even in context where I would think one would assume
it was probably not being defiled, such as in reading

(35:35):
of the Torah. So you might have readings aloud from
the Torah where the reader would come to the four
letter name of God, and then instead of saying it,
the reader would substitute something like the word ad and i,
which means lord or master. But then in time, the
originally euphemistic ad and i, which was just substituted to

(35:56):
avoid saying the original name, also came to be charged
with the aria general holiness of the name of God.
And so then later you'd have some Jews referring to
God as Hashem, meaning the name. So you you have
this evolutionary process by which um a word is used
to avoid disrespect, but then that word sort of becomes

(36:16):
worthy of respect in in its own right. But then anyway,
so according to the Talmud, sometimes shortly after the conquest
of Alexander the Great, the high priest stopped saying the
name of God when when giving blessings. And in the Mishnah,
which is a work of Jewish rabbinic literature, putting down
lots of Jewish oral traditions into writing. The name of

(36:38):
God is often avoided and substituted with other words associated
with God, like Heaven or the place, or the Holy One,
blessed be he uh and so again. I think these
ephemisms are interesting because they're not used to avoid mentioning
something unpleasant or offensive, but to avoid accidental def ailement

(37:00):
of a word that, in this religious concept context, is
believed to be holy, believed to be treated with reverence
and respect. That's interesting because I think it's easy to
to believe that you just have all these different names
for for God solely because hey, God's really cool, really
important and has all these uh these these different points

(37:21):
in time where people are considering it and therefore they
need a different name for it, uh, you know. And
then we see that that sort of loose interpretation reflected
in our discussion of unreal deities, where so like Goes
goes a the Ghazarian has several different names and Ghostbusters, um,
probably just because goes Are is cool and needs a
number of names. Right, Yeah, it's true, like you've lost

(37:45):
the original, uh, the original rationale for all this diversification,
but you've still got the process. It's a cargo cult
of naming deity. But I was just wondering, are there
similar euphemisms and other religions too, for for either one
for talking about concepts that might be uncomfortable to some believers,
yet they haven't been fully rejected or talking about things

(38:09):
that cannot be named out of respect. Yeah. We we
briefly talked about this before we came in here, and
we had a hard time nailing down another example. We
we talked about the devil a little bit, but I
think that's not exactly the same. It's not because there's
this there's this timeline in our development of of of
the devil as a concept that's really kind of similar
to our concept of hell, where the devil as this

(38:33):
real popular conception of the Western devil or even like
the classical devil or the or the Miltonian devil or
Dante's devil, like, these are all vastly different things, and
they occur at different points in our evolving conception of
the devil, and even just on a been a biblical basis. Uh,
you go back to say the Book of Job, like,
that's not the devil. That's that's some guy who works

(38:56):
for God. It's called Satan that I believe stems from
the Hebraic Hasitan, which was just a court role. Yeah exactly.
But then I think we've also not, um, we've not
had the same kind of evolution because the devil is
not really considered holy. So um. In fact, there's often
the the the opposite effort to to really cast the

(39:18):
devil down instead and refer to refer to it as
a worm or or what have you. Sometimes we should
do a history of the Devil show. Oh yeah, we should.
But anyway, so I want to move on yet again,
from one totally on uncontroversial subject religion, to another one politics. Um. So,
there is definitely a strong cultural import of euphemism in politics.

(39:43):
And this is this probably won't come as a surprise
to you, but exactly how it works out you might
be a little fuzzy on. And this is something that
is uh, you can definitely find explored in a really
lucid and fascinating way in the nineteen essay by George Orwell,
the English journalist and critic called Politics and the English Language.

(40:05):
And in this essay, which by the way, is a
lot of people might have read it in college as
sort of just like a writing style essay. But I
think it's a great read. It's just fun to read.
He's got a great writing style. Uh. And anyway, in
this essay, Orwell lays out a series of criticisms as
what he saw as the deterioration of the quality of
published writing in English in his time. So he's coming

(40:28):
right out of World War Two. You know, You've you've
got a you've got a victorious Soviet Union to deal with.
You've just you've just had the fall of the Nazi regime.
The world has been in chaos for a while. But anyway,
he so he's talking about in this in this climate,
the English language has really been put through the ringer.

(40:49):
Oh and I just used a cliche that he would
aborre as he attacks the use of cliches like that
in his essay. But in one famous passage, Orwell translates
a well verse from the King James Bible translation of
the Book of Ecclesiastes into the style he's referring to
in modern English. And so I just got to read

(41:10):
this because it's too good. The King James Bible says,
I returned and saw under the sun that the race
is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,
neither yet bred to the wise, nor yet riches to
men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill.
But time and chance happeneth to them all. Okay, Orwell's

(41:36):
rewriting of that in modern English is objective. Considerations of
contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in
competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity,
but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably
be taken into account. Now, it does communicate the same

(41:58):
sense basically. Yeah, I almost feel like like his translation
of it is better. Maybe I think, I think maybe
it just comes from reading too many, you know, god
awful peer of viewed papers for work. But but I
feel like that when kind of drove home a little,
a little, a little easier for me. Oh man, I

(42:19):
can't agree with you here, Robert, that is awful. Come on, yeah, hey,
you know, okay, Well anyway, so, so Orwell goes on
to say in in his main characterization that quote. Modern
writing at its worst does not consistent picking out words
for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in
order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in coming

(42:40):
together long strips of words which have already been set
in order by someone else and making the results presentable
by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing
is that it is easy, and I think there's some
truth to that, like that when you use these sort
of cliches and bloated phrases, is it writing comes very naturally.

(43:02):
You don't have to think as much about the images
or the words you're choosing as you do when you
try to write things in a simpler, uh more concrete way. Well,
I mean there's this second example. I was I instantly
thought of peer re viewed papers because there is this
this often very specific, clinical, technical discussion of what's going on. Often,

(43:24):
you know, not not all the time, but sometimes this
can feel a bit soulless. But you can you can
read it, and you you basically you basically know what
they're talking about in in great detail, and there's less
interpretation involved, and so yeah, it's it's a less creative venture, uh,
either to to write or to read. But is it

(43:47):
more exact? I don't know if it is. And I
think Well or Well might disagree with you, but I
would like to hear what you think. When season so,
I want to get to his main argument. Then maybe
you can come back and flog or Well for me.
So for Well, the decline in the quality of writing
was not just an esthetic concern. It's not just bad
writing that is less enjoyable to read. It is actually

(44:10):
a threat against truth, freedom and social democracy. English quote
becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but
the slovenly of our language makes it easier for us
to have foolish thoughts. And so if you've read Orwell's
novel novel nineteen eighty four, Robert, I assume you've read
nineteen eighty four, Yeah, you'll recall that at the time

(44:34):
of the story takes place, the totalitarian government in the novel,
working under Big Brother, is engaged in the creation of
a new form of English known as new speak and
uh in in Politics and Language, Orwell says quote, if
thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought, and new
Speak in in nineteen eighty four very much embodies this.

(44:56):
It reflects I think what orwell saw is the political
power of language. Essentially, control the use of language, and
you control how people think, control how people think, and
you command them to your purpose. Uh. And so I
want to read one long ish quote from Politics and
the English Language where he really gets to how euphemisms
are used in political writing and political journalism. So here's

(45:20):
the quote, with a few abridgements for length. In our time,
political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question begging,
and sheer, cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air,
The inhabitants are driven out into the countryside, the cattle

(45:43):
machine gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets.
This is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of
their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no
more than they can carry. This is called transfer of
the population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for

(46:03):
years without trial, shot in the back of the neck,
or sent to die of scurvy and arctic lumber camps.
This is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is
needed if one wants to name things without calling up
mental pictures of them. Consider, for instance, some comfortable English
professor defending Russian totalitarianism, and he's talking about Stalinism. There

(46:29):
he cannot say outright, I believe in killing off your
opponents when you can get good results by doing so. Probably,
therefore he will say something like this, while freely conceding
that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features with which the
humanitarian may be inclined to deplore. We must, i think,
agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political

(46:50):
opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that
the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon
to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of
concrete achievement. The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism.
A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like
soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details.

(47:14):
So what do you think about that, Robert, No, I mean,
I I agree with that. It's it guess it comes
down to, like this kind of this kind of writing
they we're talking about, is it's essentially writing like a
machine and and inviting the reader to think about the
the topic like a machine with sort of this with

(47:37):
without any of these human touches. That that that add
humanity to the subject matter, which in a I think
in a scientific environment like or certainly and say a
study about ecoli in a in a lab experiment, that's
perfectly that's perfectly fair, Like that's the way to do it.
But of course, when you when you're getting into um,

(47:57):
you know, affairs of politics and war, certainly, um, even
domestic politics. You know, the people's lives hang in the balance,
and if you distance yourself with language enough, then you
don't have to deal with the the the actual flesh
and blood ramifications of what you're talking about. But then
the other side of that is, it's somebody's job, right

(48:18):
to make a better killing machine. It's somebody's job to uh,
to to cut how the funding of public housing, you know,
so it of course they're going to try and do
it in a way that makes them feel less icky, right,
I mean, so Orwell says political language uh And he
says that this comes from both sides, from conservatives to anarchists,

(48:40):
is designed to make lies sound truthful, and murder respectable
and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
And I think there is a lot of truth to that. Yeah,
that you I mean, I understand the need for it.
I'm not saying that it has done purely out of
calculating malice. There there are people who work in in

(49:02):
government who do things that you would probably think of
as bad, but who don't think of themselves as bad people,
and so they have they have they've got to come
up with some way of getting around this. And it's
this circumlocution, or it's this neutralizing language, like we talked
about earlier, coming up with these abstract terminologies, naming things
in terms of processes rather than of consequences. You know, Uh,

(49:27):
it's not that we killed a guy, but the enemy
was neutralized and for or well, you know, I think
these types of phrases and euphemisms are they're not limited
to the rulers themselves, right that They're not limited just
two people who want to justify themselves in tyranny and
stupefy the masses with this lullaby of empty, denatured language.
They're also used by people who should know better, people

(49:51):
who who might even be critical of those in power.
Euphemisms and mushy phrases are used, he emphasizes, because they're easy.
They make writing easier, and they make thinking about concepts easier.
Euphemisms are like a lubricant that just allows you to
easily insert your mind into a conversation without struggling with

(50:12):
the most difficult implications of it. And for or well,
this is not just applicable to these political euphemisms, you know,
for killing and and and these horrible acts, but it
goes into everyday conversation. So he writes quote phrases like
a not unjustifiable assumption leaves much to be desired, would

(50:33):
serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do
well to bear in mind. Are a continuous and he says,
those are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always
at one's elbow. And I really do like that idea
of the euphemism as a painkiller. Yeah, it makes me think, well, yeah,
I'm instantly thinking of various recent examples of of strong

(50:58):
statements about about war and the use of war in
a political climate. And here I'm using euphemisms already to
to talk about it. But it's it's like, it's like,
if you have this sentence where you're gonna say, we
are going to eliminate enemy combatants, all right, and if
you if you start removing some of the euphemisms there,

(51:20):
you still have to try and make that unacceptable sentence
to whoever whoever is saying or um or listening to it.
So if if you replace eliminate with kill, if you
replace eliminate with with you know, um, carpet bomb or
something like that, and if you were then you're still
going to have to try and make it a sentence

(51:41):
that you can live with. And sometimes that comes. So
what else can you change in that sentence? You can
change enemy combatants to barbarians, you can, or or any
other various form that also dehumanizes what's going on. But
by point should by changing the direction of the dehumanization, right, Well,
that would be what was what is known as a dysphemism.

(52:02):
There's that how you pronounce it. A euphemism would be
you know, it's euphemism comes from you meaning good and
female female meaning speech. So a dysphemism is the opposite. Essentially,
you're you're taking a concept that's inherently neutral and applying
a term to it that is a bad filtering terms.

(52:23):
It essentially filters out the good imagery or things you
might associate with a thing and and gives it bad connotations. Well,
what's a good example here of a dyspimism for our listeners?
How about? How about somebody is not happy with a
deal that they made, you know, they bought a car
or something, and they say I got ripped off. Oh

(52:44):
it goes, and to take it a step further, they
would say, oh I got screwed. Yeah, I really got
screwed in that deal. Did you really get quote unquote
screwed in any of the various interpretations there? No, you
just bought something and you you later regretted how much
you spent on it or something. But they have to
use the screws on my hands and my fingers, and

(53:04):
now I have lost the ability to write, oh is
that for thumbscrews? And I'm thinking of a very medieval interpretation. Okay,
But either way, ripped off you didn't ripped off means
you got robbed. You didn't get robbed. You you made
a deal that you're that you later regretted. But that's
a dysphemism. It's it's substituting a more negative connotation word

(53:27):
for this originally, you know, more direct term, And I
guess that would be kind of on the outskirts of hyperbole,
Like you're not going as far to say this was
highway robbery, but you're getting close. Yeah, But so that
there are just like there are lots of euphemisms in
political language, there's some dysphemisms in it too. Like you
might find an establishment language the government itself and and

(53:49):
the bureaucracies that exist, and to speak in euphemisms to
kind of make everything a little a little uh smoothed
over and a little soothing. But meanwhile you might have
sort of agitators and radical factions tending to speak in dysphemisms,
talking about fairly normal things that you could express in
a fairly straightforward way in these just grandly negative terms. Yeah.

(54:14):
I think, especially in his Facebook age, everybody can think
of of strong examples of this. You know, what, how
is saving New York Times uh explaining the situation? And
how is your your your uncle Jim explaining the situation?
Where how is the article that he's linking explaining it?
Very likely I'd say The New York Times is probably
being a little euphemistic. I mean, even even their good writers,

(54:35):
they tend to be a little euphemistic, just not putting
things in very blunt, harsh terms. They might say, go
to the restroom. It's the going to the restroom of politics.
But there's plenty of dysphimism out there on the web.
But anyway, I want to come back to Orwell. So
the question is, sort of, uh, so Orwell had these
concerns about euphemisms, about their potential for enabling totalitarian is

(55:00):
them and they're they're the threat that they represented to
a free social democracy. So my question is, was Orwell's
belief in the totalitary and potential of vocabulary correct? In
some ways I'm sort of inclined to agree with him
because the examples he gives very much makes sense to me.
By by using this sort of d natured, sanitized language

(55:23):
to talk about killing people and you know, doing things
that are very harsh and cruel and have real bloody
realities and you know, down in the dirt of reality,
I'm sure it makes it easier for people to assent
to these things, to to sort of just go along
with it, we've we've found some nice words for it.

(55:44):
But then again, um, there are other strong arguments that
sort of go against the idea that vocabulary has this
much power over our thinking. And I guess we can
maybe address these after a break. Do you want to
take a break. Let's take a quick break and we
come back. We'll talk about the euphemism treadmill as well
as the the war Fian view, uh and the work

(56:05):
of Stephen Pinker. So we were talking about whether this
totalitarian potential of vocabulary control is correct. Do words really
have this much power to control the way we think?
Does language determined thought? So, as linguist Stephen Pinker has

(56:26):
pointed out, the Orwellian view is really kind of based
in what's referred to as the war Fian view. This
is the work of American linguists Benjamin Lee Wharf, no
relation to the kling on that different spell like I believe,
also often known as the Sappier Wharf hypothesis. Yes, and uh,
he to give you a timeline for him, he was

(56:46):
through one. That's when he was alive. And uh yeah,
So his his argument and then therefore or Will's argument
is yes, language, Uh we we language is how we
think we think in language. This is the like the
bare bones languages, the operating for the operating system for
the human brain view. But a lot of cognitive neuroscience

(57:07):
now says, I don't know if that view is correct.
In fact, it's probably not. Right now, I will say this, Uh,
this is an important fact that to keep in mind
about language is that while spoken language comes to us
naturally or expose who are growing up, we simply absorb
the words that fill our world multiple languages even, Um,

(57:28):
it's not the same with written language. Written language takes work.
We have to trick our brains early on in order
to avoid backwards letters. The dB confusion because our brains
inherently try to decipher symbols and letters is three dimensional objects.
I never thought about that. Yeah, it's a I was
reading or listening to something about that recently. Uh. The point, however,

(57:48):
here is that that written language is kind of a lie.
So grammar, rules, dictionaries, all of these attempt to to
chain that which is free, to solidify the inherently fluid
nature of language. Uh. Certainly humans have been saying the
same things for a very long time and will continue
to say, say the same horrible things, but how we
say them changes the individual words the cultural weight of

(58:10):
those words. Um and I often think of think of
this in terms of weighted stones placed upon a sheet, Okay,
like a sheet that's held talk by yeah. Um. This
is an exercise that's frequently used to demonstrate how massive
planetary objects bend uh an exert gravitational forces, like the
sheet of space time and and a rock is an

(58:32):
object with mass. But instead of each stone being um,
you know, planet, each stone is a word. And unlike
actual stones and i'm, unlike words as we might experience
them in a dictionary, the weights change. So this is
where we get into this idea that the Stephen Pinker
gives us, the idea of the euphemism treadmill, the linguistic

(58:56):
process by which euphemisms often become taboo or a So
a euphemism is originally created in order to avoid having
to say the taboo or offensive or uncomfortable thing, but
then in time, the euphemism itself takes on the properties
of that original word you were trying to avoid. Yeah.

(59:16):
Have you ever played a platform video game where your
character has to jump onto a pillar and once you
stand on the pillar, it begins to sink down. You
have to jump to the next pillar, and that starts
doing the same thing. And this is how you have
to cross this entire expanse of muck. You've got to
keep moving. Yeah, that's basically what's going on here with
the euphemism treadmill. Polite language, you have to keep moving,

(59:39):
Pinker says. Quote. The euphemism treadmill shows that concepts, not words,
are in charge. Give a concept a new name, and
the name becomes colored by the concept. The concept does
not become freshened by the name. So he gives examples
of like the progression of terminology for people with disabilities. Uh.
So he starts with the idea that crippled. Originally that

(01:00:01):
was not an offensive term. That was a polite term
right to describe somebody who had a disability, But it
took on negative connotations. People began to use it as
a mean word to say about people. So then that
was moved on and so so we no longer say that,
and now we have handicapped. But then that also eventually

(01:00:22):
became perceived as sort of like stale as a euphemism.
I guess, and this I guess it started to take
on some of the negative connotations that crippled had acquired,
and then moved on to disabled, and so you've got
differently abled is is more of the current version, Like
we've moved on again to another pillar in the right.
So you can so on one hand, just if you're

(01:00:44):
looking from the outside, you'd be like constantly moving words around.
That seems kind of ridiculous, but it's not when you
consider how usage of words happens and how language works. Yeah,
I mean people, if people are using a word with
negative connotations, eventually people who want to use that word
with positive connotations will want a different word. Yeah. Another

(01:01:05):
great example of this that's so asided is the use
of idiot or moron. These used to be neutral terms.
They weren't insults, right, but over time they became they
became insults, and now they are very much an insult.
And because someone an idiot or moron, you're using an insult.
You're not using a neutral term. So we went from
that to retarded, which at for like, it feels weird

(01:01:28):
to say it because it now it is the R
word unless you're you know, using it in very particular circumstances. Um.
But but this was this was neutral, and then it
became an obscene term. Uh. And then from here we
went to mentally mentally challenged and special. But even these
I feel are degraded, uh to a large degree, especially special,

(01:01:49):
like to say someone special. I can I can't think
of any specific examples, but I believe I've heard that
used at least flippantly, if not as an outright offense.
Oh yeah, it is the thing mean kids say. Now,
like a mean kid wants to they'll they'll call another
kids special children. If you're out there listening, I don't
know why children are listening to, but you should not
see the children. That's not very nice. But yeah, again,

(01:02:11):
it shows that as soon as so you come up with.
And I'd be interested to see if somebody could create
a a like time lag model of this, like how
long after a new non offensive term is introduced does
it take before that term takes on some unpleasant connotations
people start using it as a term of insult or abuse,

(01:02:34):
and people who want to speak politely feel like they
need a new term, Like how long does it generally take?
Another example of this I think would be in business.
So we already talked about the robust use of euthanisms
in the business environment. But also think about the buzzwords, right,
those buzz words. They gotta have buzz or they're not buzzwords,

(01:02:56):
and buzzwords inherently lose their buzz. So you know, everybody
might be talking about the I can't. I can't even
think of what the most recent one has been in
our circles. But to take an older one, like there
was a time when when innovation, innovation or storytelling, we
are all story storytelling is the one. I hate that
these words have been completely destroyed, but I believe they have.

(01:03:17):
We need we need new words and storytelling. Come on,
I love stories. Stories are like my favorite thing on earth.
But when I hear when I hear business leaders talking
about storytelling, I'm like, well, okay, we can't. We can't
describe it like that anymore. Yeah, yeah, because it it
ends up losing that. It loses it's it's punch, it

(01:03:39):
loses its value, and since it loses its holiness, oh yeah, yeah,
it does lose its holiness. And it also comes to
stop referring to the thing it originally referred to when
it basically just means like any talking in any talking
or writing or or any kind of communication can be storytelling.
That's not storytelling, right, what is storytelling? Yeah? Exactly. Now,

(01:04:03):
to come back to the euphemism treadmill real quick, I
also want to point out that I have seen it
argue that this is essentially uh, this essentially lines up
with Gresham's law Gresham's law in economics, which states that
bad money drives out the good. This is a name
for Sir Thomas Gresham, the financial agent of Queen Elizabeth
the First. And the idea here was that if some

(01:04:25):
coins in circulation are pure pure silver and others are
less pure, people are going to spend the bad coins
if they're gonna keep the good ones for themselves. So
what do you know? Yeah, so that that makes sense
to me. Yeah, that that correlation with the euphemism treadmill.
But also you have a note here, Robert about a
different kind of treadmill that I found interesting. Yeah, we've
already mentioned disphemisms. There is a dispiphemism treadmill as well.

(01:04:50):
And the example that that comes up is that sucks.
That sucks stems from a a more specific us statement
that is also still in use, but a more offensive one.
You can say something sucks and it's you know, it's
in kids TV shows, but you know it's it's on
you know, whatever's on Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network during the

(01:05:12):
day when children are watching, but they're they're not going
to say what something is sucking. Yeah. When I was
a kid, I remember saying that sucks, thinking it was
a totally non offensive phrase, and having a teacher, Uh,
tell me, you know, if I had said that word,
it would have been like I said a word that
rhymes with it. Yeah, it was Uh, he was saying

(01:05:34):
that that that is a really really offensive term. But
it wasn't like that to me, and it was that
it had lost its dysphemistic qualities. Yeah. And it's one
of those two when you start peeling out apart, it's like,
why is that a stay? Why is that bad? I
don't know. It's we get we get all our sexual
politics wrapped up in in in how you feel about

(01:05:54):
the latest X Men movie. Another one I can think
of that we can edit this out if it's way
more offen ti than I think. But I think one
is the British exploit British English expression bloody, which I
think used to be considered incredibly offensive, like a highly
offensive expletive, and now is an incredibly mild expletive that's

(01:06:16):
so much so that it can appear in Harry Potter
books and stuff. Yeah, I wonder I've never looked into it,
but I've often wondered, like, to what extent is it
still a little more offensive in British circles than it
is an American because so much American usage of it,
we're just aping British usage of it without really having
a strong cultural understanding maybe of what is being said.

(01:06:39):
That's a good question again, maybe we're we're yet again
doing the cargo cult of euphemism. Yeah, and you kind
of get a guess into the like the currency equivalences
of of different insults or sorry, this wouldn't be of euphemism.
Is the cargo cult of explotives? Okay, but let's come
back to what we started talking about with the idea
of the war fian view and or well, so we've

(01:07:00):
got this this other argument from Pinker and from you know,
cognitive neuroscience and all this. Who says they say, you know,
the words don't really matter actually all that much. Um,
words don't have this power, but I I don't feel that,
I feel very strongly that Orwell was onto something. Yeah. Yeah,
and uh and I actually found a paper that gets

(01:07:23):
into this a bit. It's very good as available is
readily available online. Two thousand and eight paper by um
By Stanford's daniel U Casa Santo has published in the
journal Language Learning. Uh. And the title is Who's afraid
of the Big Bad warf Cross linguistic differences in temporal
language and thought. So this is addressing the Wharfian view

(01:07:44):
that language in some way determines or influences thought. Yeah.
And it's interesting because he I'm not gonna say he
takes a middle of the road approach. It's definitely more
in Pinker's direction. He's not saying that the Warfian view
is valid completely, but that there that we can't. But
but what are you saying is that we can't completely
dismiss the power of this this war Fian Uh. Relationship

(01:08:10):
between thoughts and words. Okay, so maybe that words don't
totally determine thoughts, but they have some kind of influencing relationship. Yes, exactly.
In fact, I'll read a just a quick quote from
this article to to really drive this home. Why should
we continue to do war Fian research. One possible reason
is that cataloging cross linguistic cognitive differences could be a

(01:08:31):
step toward charting the boundaries of human biological and cultural diversity.
If this is the goal, then the war Fian effects
most worth findings should be extreme instances in which differences
between languages produced radically different experiences of reality in their speakers. Alternatively,
cross linguistic cognitive differences could be tools for investigating how

(01:08:54):
thinking works, and in particular, for investigating the role of
experience and the acquisition and representation of knowledge. If people
who talk differently from correspondingly different mental representations as a consequence,
then mental representations must depend in part on these aspects
of linguistic experience. If discovering the origin and structure of

(01:09:15):
our mental representations is the goal, then cross linguistic cognitive
differences can be informative, even if they are subtle, and
even if their effects are largely unconscious. Whether or not
they correspond to radical differences in speakers conscious experiences of
the world, Warpian effects can have profound implications for the
study of mental representation. Okay, so yeah, he is taking

(01:09:38):
maybe I would call that a mental view. Even if
even if he's saying, like the war Fian hypothesis that
language determines thought is wrong, Uh, there's still influences that
are worth investigating. Yeah, yeah, well I would say that. Yeah, yeah,
I think that's the that's the point, like that, essentially
that language is still too powerful, it's too ubiquitous, it's

(01:10:00):
playing some sort of role. It's do we just have
to It's just to what extent and in which cases
it's most transformative. Interesting. Well, so I wanted to end
by thinking about a little more about what is the
effect of using euphemisms on our minds and on our culture,
Because when you come up with terms like, you know,
the euphemism treadmill, I'm not saying Pinker necessarily meant it

(01:10:22):
this way. I detect a little bit of amusement on
his part, but I'm not saying he definitely meant it
to be a term of derision. But you do get
this idea of a treadmill being a thing that's sort
of like useless cycle. Uh, And it's not necessarily useless
according to some thinkers. And I wanted to talk about
an essay uh done for aon magazine in twenty sixteen

(01:10:45):
by the Columbia University linguistics professor John mcwarder. And so
he starts by recognizing Pinker's concept of the euphemism treadmill,
and he gives a lot of really great examples of
these types of treadmills throughout history. Like we talked about.
He he talks about the evolution of the concept of
welfare um welfare originally being like uh, you know, home assistance,

(01:11:08):
and then welfare and then cash assistance. Where each time
there's a new term, it sort of starts to take
on mean classist connotations, and then you need a new
term because it starts to be used as a term
of abuse. But for mcwarter, this he says, this treadmill
is not only inevitable but pretty much good in in

(01:11:30):
his words, a healthy process necessary in view of the
eternal gulf between language and opinion. Uh and he he
says basically that thought changes more slowly than word usage,
but it eventually catches up. And this requires that in
a civilized society, people are going to frequently want to
change their euphemisms. It's an inevitable thing, and it reflects

(01:11:54):
people's desire to be polite and civilized toward one another,
except of course, on the Internet, where one does not
have to be polite or ciful. But that's that's kind
of that's a whole separate discussion right there. Right, of course,
you're always going to have people who want to defy.
But near his conclusion, he says, quote, the euphemism treadmill, then,
is neither just a form of bureaucratese nor of identity politics.

(01:12:18):
It is a symptom of the fact that, however much
we would like it to be otherwise, it's easier to
change language than to change thought. In a sense, it's
like you're you're simply asking someone, Look, I know you're
not going to stop being awful anytime soon, but if
you could at least use the language that doesn't, you know,
wear your awfulness on your sleeve, and that would be great.

(01:12:40):
And maybe in time that outward decency will will bleed
through to some semblance of interdecency. Right, yeah, yeah, I
guess so. Like again, earlier, we talked about euphemisms being
a painkiller or also being a lubricant, and in the
sense it might be both of those things. Maybe euphem
is UM's uh, or or finding a nicer new word

(01:13:03):
for a word that is taken on negative connotations. If
that's what a euphemism is, I guess um. It might
not solve the underlying problem. It might not fix people's attitudes,
but it might just be exactly what it seems like.
It's a lubricant. It's a painkiller. It makes interacting in
society easier, makes people get along a little bit better.

(01:13:26):
I can't help but think of the term African American.
The adoption of that term to replace various other terms
for uh, you know, black American citizens, uh has it?
You know it? It drives home the fact that this
is your fellow American, This is a this is an American,
and they have a particular origin, just as you and

(01:13:47):
your uh you know, Caucasian or or Asian or what
have you, just as as your your family has an
origin somewhere else as well, like they are. These individuals
are are not that different from you. So do you
think that that term actually helps people change their way
of thinking? Or is it just this just this lubricant

(01:14:09):
that makes it easier to live in a polite society
and get along with each other. I don't know. I
guess I hope. I like to think I would prefer
to live in a world where the language changes the
way you think that in in in in having to
call an individual something more humanizing that eventually you will

(01:14:31):
see them in more human terms. But then again, I
don't think any of us believe that language alone is
the sole operator here, like that it has to has
to come as part of a larger suite of of
of social change instruments. So yeah, I think i'd agree
with that, and with what mcwardour is saying. But I
guess the flip side of it is that we're accepting

(01:14:53):
some truth of what Orwell is saying. And in many
cases euphemisms are also going to corrupt clarity of thought,
may guess sort of dull and irresolute, and and make
it harder for us to resist evil. And so maybe
maybe the case is not about whether euphemisms are good
or bad, but just that some euphemisms are more worthy

(01:15:13):
than others. I think. So yeah, I mean words are powerful,
and the right euphemisms are also powerful. So all you
can do is hope that uh, you know, whoever is
in a position of power has the best words at
their disposal and that cheerful note. Let's let's end by

(01:15:33):
just discussing a few favorite euphemisms. What are some of yours, Joe?
I love how you'll see this a lot in Europe.
The bathroom, which is itself a euphemism. Is the WC
that has just been reduced to a couple of letters,
like not even water closet. I like that, like w C.

(01:15:54):
Fields Um. I don't know if it's quite a euphemism,
but I have always been fond of the I believe.
I don't know if he invented the phrase, but it
certainly shows up in Shakespeare's Othello, making the beast with
two backs as a euphemism, or or perhaps the opposite

(01:16:15):
for sexual intercourse. I don't know if that's a euphemism.
That's fairly expressive, it's it's it's expressive, but it all,
but it definitely changes the meaning of the thing, like uh,
I don't know. I guess it comes down to would
you are there cases where you would say making the
beast with two backs and it would be more polite
than saying they were having sexual intercourse, they were having sex.

(01:16:39):
I don't think that's the case. It's there must be
another word for whatever. That type of thing is where
you have a word or a phrase that means the
same thing as something else and it's not more polite,
but it's just like more I don't know, funnier, like
making whoopie. I think that would be an example, because
whoopi is like whoopee. It's it's fun. It's fun like
if you were just okay here. The three choe us

(01:17:00):
is imagine you're in a roommate scenario and you have
to say, oh, well, I walked in on my roommate
and um, he and his partner were making the beast
with two backs like that, or if you were to say, well,
I walked in on my my roommate and he and
his partner were making whoopie. Like which of the two,
But the two summoned vastly different images. They're both highly polite, yes,

(01:17:23):
incredibly generous. Al Right, Well, uh, I know everybody out
there has their favorite euphemisms and uh and certainly some
some cross cultural examples we'd love to hear, so you
should definitely reach out to us about them. You can
find us in a number of places, but the best
starting point is to just go head on over to
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(01:17:43):
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(01:18:04):
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