Have you found yourself in the position of biting your tongue because what you just said sounded horrible and blunt?
And then you started thinking “ Oh God, I could have uttered it in a more sophisticated way so that I could get my message across in a more convincing and less intrusive way.
Apparently so our Greek predecessors who incorporated the so called euphemismos in the language meaning ‘speaking well’. Euphemisms are linguistic devices occurring in everyday social interaction across the world. They are mostly used in an relieving way and as a strategy to neutralize wording or phrasing in order to remain courteous and potentially save the speaker or hearer from embarrassment. Given its bleak and melancholic nature, death is a common target for euphemisms, as phrases such as “passing away”, “putting to sleep”, and “ethnic cleansing” are all death-related euphemisms for dying, euthanasia, and genocide respectively. Can you think of other topics in English which entail common euphemisms?
As well as reducing the degree of intensity, (by describing a poor person as “underprivileged” or referring to Voldemort as “He who must not be named”), people also use euphemisms to embellish a subject, making it seem better or of greater importance (by referring to a shop using words like “boutique” or “emporium” for instance). According to Allan and Burridge (1991), their occurrence across all known world languages constitutes a linguistic universal.
All euphemisms must follow three principles, concludes a recent study. It must be distant enough from the unpleasant topic it covers, related enough to the concept in order to make an indirect link and pleasant enough that it brings to mind a better connotation.
To illustrate this, consider the term we are going to have to “let you go ”or “make you redundant” οr as a euphemism for “You’re fired”. Assuming everyone in a given conversation is familiar with this taboo topic, using the euphemism “They had to let him go” brings to mind a mild-enough association with the likely-uncomfortable concept in conversation without being too associated or too irrelevant whilst avoiding much embarrassment due to the euphemism’s connotation being considerably less unpleasant.
One interesting product of certain euphemisms is humour. Dialogue from the first season of British TV Drama ‘Downton Abbey’ presents a great opportunity to study euphemisms and their uses in order to make sentences more “vivid and pleasant” to the audience and can thus produce a sense of humour.
Examples of such include the use of the phrases “not a lady’s man” and “a troubled soul” by a servant to describe a homosexual character as well as the state of pregnancy being referred to as “a surge of fertility” by a doctor, which the authors suggest is indirect and non-offensive and yet still expresses what the character wants to imply.
Euphemisms at the workplace
Newly-coined words or phrases often arrive in languages as euphemisms to replace pre-existing terms stigmatised as taboo or uneasy to talk about socially and professionally. Some of them have morphed into corporate words that expanded and took over our vocabulary.
Euphemisms at the workplace may be formed in a number of ways. The formation of euphemism, on a certain degree, follows some principles, although some language phenomena are not reasonable but come into use frequently. Euphemisms can be achieved by using metaphors, idioms, acronyms, negation or substitution.
The most common topic in business for euphemisms is can you guess? Apparently the delicate issue of “layoffs.” So we often hear words such as involuntary separation, letting go, downsizing, re-engineering, restructuring, and streamlining.
Think about the word challenge which is just a problem or difficulty but doesn’t it sound “more challenging”as a word? Look at the following catchphrases which have replaced common words and makes us sound….”more different”. They are quite tempting to use because they sound more sophisticated and smart , don’t they? And I am sure you will often hear them at your workplace.
1. At the end of the day =eventually
2. Back to the drawing board= start all over again
3. Hit the ground running= immediately work hard
4. Get the ball rolling= start doing something
5. Think outside the box = think from a new perspective
6. To be perfectly frank= I am going to be rude now
7. This isn’t about you= Actually it is
8. It’s on my radar= considered important
9. Ping me= send a quick message
10. No brainer= something obvious
11. On my plate =occupying lots of my energy
12. Synergy=combined value and performance
13. Move the goal post= change the criterion of a process
14. Win-win=a result good for all parties
15. Deep dive = brainstorming
16. Low hanging fruit = easily attainable win you have to grab
17. Leverage = advantage over another
18. Move the needle = make significant effort
Here is the challenge for you. Can you think of other buzzwords we often use to replace more common ones?
Article adapted from www.unravellingmag.com by Efi Panagiotopoulou