MODERN American speech, while not always clear or correct or turned with much style, is supposed to be uncommonly frank. Witness the current explosion of four-letter words and the explicit discussion ...

“Where is the euphemism?” A college friend used to ask this question to point out the silliness of calling a toilet a bathroom. Euphemism in ordinary speech may be amusing, stilted, or polite, but in ...

Social media openly longs for the death of an individual who is hardly ever named ...

Thanks to marketing, we now express ourselves with euphemisms: words or expressions that are substituted in order to make a blunt or unpleasant truth seem less harsh. Putting a good spin on things, ...

The Trump administration takes pleasure in deploying dysphemism to describe the killing of Iranians On 23 March, Donald Trump said that if things didn’t go to his liking in Iran, “we just keep bombing ...

Historically, euphemism has been correlated to fear or superstition. For example, often times we hear death referred to as passing away; while death is inevitable, avoiding direct reference to it both ...

This week’s column deals with a three-part query sent in by a reader: Sir, the title of your column last week was Eve-teasing is a euphemism used only in India (Dec 8). Is it correct to use the ...