{"id":33157,"date":"2023-04-19T10:06:44","date_gmt":"2023-04-19T10:06:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open-up.ch\/euphemisms-or-the-glossing-over-of-reality\/"},"modified":"2023-04-24T12:53:15","modified_gmt":"2023-04-24T12:53:15","slug":"euphemisms-or-the-glossing-over-of-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open-up.ch\/en\/euphemisms-or-the-glossing-over-of-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"Euphemisms or the glossing over of reality"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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19.04.2023|<\/p>\n

Euphemisms or the glossing over of reality<\/strong><\/h2>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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\u00abNegative yield\u00bb, \u00abroom attendant\u00bb or \u00abprecariat\u00bb: hardly a day goes by without us encountering a euphemism for a supposedly unpleasant word. In public euphemisms enjoy great popularity, especially in business and politics. In private they crop up reliably when it comes to taboo subjects. But once the verbal whitewash is exposed, it usually backfires.<\/strong><\/p>

Euphemisms lurk everywhere. They\u2019re not a new phenomenon, but probably nearly as old as the first human words. Since time immemorial, euphemisms have served to trivialise or camouflage facts, circumvent offensive subjects and taboos, spare feelings or make unpleasantness more palatable. As we\u2019ve moved into the information age, the spread of euphemisms seems to have accelerated. This development was already predicted by the writer George Orwell in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em>, where he also coined the appropriate term for it: Newspeak.<\/p>

Mother tongue of manipulation
<\/strong>While Newspeak in Orwell\u2019s novel is a means for the totalitarian regime to eradicate freedom of thought, the reasons for today\u2019s use of euphemisms are of course far more complex. Euphemistic words aren\u2019t limited to political systems or individual languages but can be found everywhere. What they all have in common is a certain degree of manipulation. While this is usually more pronounced in politics and business and done with calculation, it\u2019s more subtle in private life and often serves to spare feelings. Thus, when talking about death, people prefer to talk about \u00abpeacefully falling asleep\u00bb rather than dying, termination of pregnancy\u00bb instead of abortion, and visiting parents or grandparents in the \u00absenior citizens\u00bb residence\u00bb rather than an old people\u2019s home. \u00a0<\/p>

The more explicit, the more veiled<\/strong>\u00a0
What tends to be the case is that the more explicit the topic is, the more veiled the euphemism. Some of the most hair-raising examples are found in war reporting. There, civilian war victims are often called \u00abcollateral damage\u00bb or a targeted killing is labelled a \u00abneutralisation\u00bb of the enemy. The \u00abconcentration camp\u00bb gained sad notoriety a long time ago, while torture has famously been referred to as \u00abenhanced interrogation\u00bb. The world of business and politics, too, sometimes uses euphemisms with eye-rubbing audacity: terms like human capital\u00bb, \u00abalternative facts\u00bb and \u00absocially acceptable job cuts\u00bb actually have only one goal: to distract from reality and play down or completely distort the facts.<\/p>

Whitewashing has short legs
<\/strong>One thing\u2019s for sure: sooner or later whitewashing will be exposed. Or to put it another way, what\u2019s covered up tends to be revealed. Once they\u2019re seen through, euphemisms often say more about the people or organisations that use them instead of calling a spade a spade from the start. So at the end of the day, the use of euphemisms tends to achieve the opposite of what was intended: glossing things over makes them worse, not better. The jug goes to the well until it breaks.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Author
<\/strong>Fabian Baer likes to call a spade a spade and tries to limit euphemisms as far as possible to those areas where they can enrich the language: in poetry or irony. Of course, depending on the context, he may sometimes call something \u201csuboptimal\u201d. A sketch<\/span><\/a> by the legendary American stand-up comic George Carlin really got him in the mood for the topic.<\/p>

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    \u00abNegative yield\u00bb, \u00abroom attendant\u00bb or \u00abprecariat\u00bb: hardly a day goes by without us encountering a euphemism for a supposedly unpleasant word. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":33029,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"elementor_header_footer","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-views"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nEuphemisms or the glossing over of reality - open up<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"\u00abNegative yield\u00bb, \u00abroom attendant\u00bb or \u00abprecariat\u00bb: hardly a day goes by without us encountering a euphemism for a supposedly unpleasant word.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.open-up.ch\/en\/euphemisms-or-the-glossing-over-of-reality\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Euphemisms or the glossing over of reality - 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