Euphemism

[Sir Velo]

OT, but I do so wish posters would not use queues of capital letters in this way when posting.

Or highly tedious and tortuously unfunny puns?

[salymap]

"We are watching your salary", Meaning you are doing an executive job, being paid peanuts, MAY get a rise.

That's the music publishing world for you.

[teamsaint]

"We are watching your salary", Meaning you are doing an executive job, being paid peanuts, MAY get a rise.

That's the music publishing world for you.

the rest of the world has caught on.

Now they give you a "promotion" but no pay rise.

[Pabmusic]

I searched my diminishing memory (and Hugh Rawson's Euphemisms and Other Doubletalk). Here's a few results:

• One favourite euphemism (seemingly unknown now) is for shoplifting: the five-finger discount.
• Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia won an award in 1977 for renaming its lift operators the Vertical Transportation Corps.
• Ones still in regular use: irregularity (rather than fraud); voluntary = unpaid; assassination = murder of someone important;
• Massage parlour - so much still that I doubt it's easy to open a literal one without sniggers.
• One (from America) that has persisted: chicken drumstick (for leg; also white meat for breast).
• Rather nasty today is traige, an agricultural euphemism for ignoring large sections of any group by selecting the most deserving cases.
• There are many poetic ones: "He wears his honour in a box unseen" (All's Well That End's Well") (box or hot-box = part of the female anatomy - the 'aphrodisiacal tennis court').
• Virtually - I quote Rawson "a word with a built-in loophole of considerable size". It means 'not entirely'.
• Donkey = ass (invented during the prudish period of the 18th Century in imitation of monkey, and pronounced similarly).
• Worst of all were Endlössung, Aussiedlung, Sonderbhandlung and Umsiedlung - final solution, evacuation, special treatment and resettlement. For which read ethnic cleansing now.

[teamsaint]

to add to Pabs post

"Equal but different".

[gurnemanz]

[*]Worst of all were Endlössung, Aussiedlung, Sonderbhandlung and Umsiedlung - final solution, evacuation, special treatment and resettlement. For which read ethnic cleansing now.[/LIST]

In his book LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii (Language of the Third Reich) Viktor Klemperer also draws attention to the the Nazis' use of to what amounts to the opposite of euphemism, when it suits their purpose. Extreme words such as "fanatical" that normally have a negative connotation become positive, in order to push the Nazi ideology, under which being pitiless, totally committed and uncompromising is a virtue.

[teamsaint]

I imagine there are rich pickings here....

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/major-restructure-waterstones-management-staff.html