Horses Sweat, Men Perspire, But Women Merely Glow

Seventy years ago, give or take a year, I made a chance remark to my mother. I said Aunt Eva was sweating. Mother gently reproved me.

"No, dear," she said. "Horses sweat. Men perspire. But ladies merely glow."

I thought of this semantic distinction a few weeks ago when Crown Publishers sent me galleys of Hugh Rawson's updated Dictionary of Euphemisms and Other Doubletalk. Rawson is the undisputed top authority on euphemisms. His book is a browser's delight.

A euphemism is "the substitution of an agreeable or inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant." English speech contains hundreds, probably thousands of them, both positive and negative.

Positive euphemisms inflate and magnify. A garbage truck becomes a sanitation truck; a doorman becomes an access controller. Negative euphemisms deflate and minimize. Thus a prostitute becomes a "lady of the evening," and adultery slips away as "an extramarital affair."

Because I believe most euphemisms sin against clarity, I try to avoid them. But not always. Depending entirely on one's audience, a writer may have sound reasons for not calling a spade a spade. There is nothing wrong with sensitivity. There is much that is right in seeking never unintentionally to offend anyone.

Truth in fatigues

The most objectionable euphemisms are those that wrap plain truths in army fatigues, the better to camouflage their impact. Rawson tells the story of Col. David H.E. Opter, who served as air attache at the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in 1973. He complained one day to newsmen: "You always write it's bombing, bombing, bombing! It's not bombing. It's air support."

In the same fashion, the accidental killing of our own soldiers becomes "friendly fire" or "incontinent ordnance." The CIA at one time had no intention of murdering Fidel Castro; the idea was to dispose of him instead. In 1977 a racial riot broke out in Montreal, but the police chief denied it:

"It wasn't a riot at all. It was a melee. No, melee isn't right either. What happened here was an aberration of the social system."

My impression is that in some areas euphemistic speech is on the decline. I count that a good thing. When I broke into newspapering as a cub reporter in 1941, all kinds of taboos were in place. It would have been unthinkable to write of a woman's breasts. The proper terminology, if the matter had to be discussed at all, was to speak of her bosom, her chest or her upper torso. There was no such thing, in print, as syphilis or gonorrhea; there were only social diseases.

We now report, straight out, that Vincent Foster killed himself; he did not meet death by his own hand. Editors authorize candid identification of bodily parts and functions. Testimony at a recent rape trial dealt with pubic hair and semen, and that was the way we read it in the papers.

Sillier, more numerous

I also have a contradictory impression that euphemisms are getting sillier and more numerous all the time. There is something pathetic in identifying a stupid child as an exceptional underachiever. Prison inmates are not "clients of the correctional system." They are prisoners. When a prisoner attempted five years ago to tattle on Vice President Dan Quayle, reporters were told that the prisoner was in "administrative detention." Where he was, was in a solitary cell.

Some years ago the news director of a TV station in Portland, Ore., reported on the air that a local personage had been "fired." The next day brought a memo from the station manager: "You said that Eric was `fired.' Hope that was just your pencil moving too fast. He wasn't fired. He is a reduction in force."

So it goes. Within the Postal Service, employees may be "excessed out." Their jobs revert. At IBM, the firing of employees at one time was "management-initiated attrition." Few companies fire, but many outplace.

The principal objection to euphemistic speech lies in the damage done to meaning. The specific yields to the general, and we get George Bush's vision "thing." Society abounds with ambiguous "problems." A person who stutters has a "speech impairment." A cripple is "differently abled."

The presumption is that such cashmere delicacy warms the hearts of an affected group. The Indian will be pleased to know that, mysteriously, he is a "native American." Workers will be comforted to learn that a Social Security deduction is not a tax, it's a contribution.

The sagacious Hobbes, of "Calvin and Hobbes," once speculated that by such devices "we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding." Hobbes had it just about right.

(Copyright 1995, Universal Press Syndicate)

The Writer's Art by James J. Kilpatrick appears Sunday in the Scene section. Address comments or questions to: Writer's Art, c/o Newsroom, The Seattle Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111.