"'Pushing Up Daisies' And Our Passion For Euphemisms" from NPR's talk of the Nation

From "passed away" to "Chilean sea bass," euphemisms are a way to avoid unpleasant terms or phrases. But in Euphemania, Ralph Keyes argues that using them isn't necessarily lazy or evasive; it can actually be harder to not say what we mean and still get our point across. "Euphemisms can be incredibly playful and a lot of fun — very creative," Keyes tells NPR's Neal Conan. Take, for example, the euphemisms we use for death. Keyes notes that the French talk about "eating dandelions by the root," their version of "pushing up daisies." He also recalls an old high school classmate who once told him how the life insurance industry avoids the word: "When one of their policy holders became eligible for his benefits to go to his heirs, they said he was 'post-retirement.'" And one of the author's favorite modern expressions is "going offline."

Read that full NPR feature story here. Download the podcast here. Read a few pages of the book here. See also: The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear In "To Put It Another Way: True, we often try to avoid plain words, but we should be careful about what we call a euphemism," Eric Felten out of the Wall Street Journal writes that the author:

[...] assures us that his book "is not meant to be a compilation of euphemisms." And yet that is mostly what it is. Alas, while piling up examples, Mr. Keyes seems to exhibit a glib indifference to whether the euphemisms he cites were ever in real circulation. Consider one of the first examples he offers of military circumlocution: "Bombadiers no longer 'drop bombs,' " he writes; "they unleash vertically deployed antipersonnel devices." Really? Goodness knows the military is rife with jargon, some of it euphemistic. But just try to find an instance of "vertically deployed antipersonnel device" actually being used by the military. The source for this claim appears to be one of several books on euphemisms published over the past couple of decades. And those books seem to have based the claim on a brief item 20 years ago in the Quarterly Review of Doublespeak, a newsletter once compiled by William Lutz, a Rutgers University professor.

Read that WSJ piece here.