American Heritage: Euphemism Language

According to the American Heritage Dictionary euphemism is "the act or an example of substituting a mild, indirect, or vague term for one considered harsh, blunt, or offensive". Euphemisms exist in any language and their usage is determined by various factors – culture, religion, politics, gender, age, ethnicity (Popova,2010). Euphemisms is word that used to replace harsh or in other word, inappropriate word instead trying to use other form of words and phrases to make it sound more acceptable. This is called euphemistic language. An euphemism also is an expression intended by the speaker to be less offensive, disturbing, or troubling to the listener than the word or phrase it replaces .Euphemism is basically an indirect word or a phrase that

It becomes important in the sense of not to hurt other people’s feeling. It is a way to make an appropriate reference to something that is unpleasant. For instance, the euphemisms for ‘die’ is ‘pass away’ or ‘a final rest and depart of one’s live’ (Siddiqui,2014). Next, it is also importance as we need to convey the message properly. So by using euphemisms , there will be no offended towards our writing or speech. The message will be conveyed appropriately by the help of euphemisms. Another example of euphemisms to indicate kindness is when we used ‘where is the rest room’ instead of ‘where is the toilet’ when we speak to people in a proper places. In addition, the uses of euphemisms prevent the nasty-effects of disagreeable-message-indigestion when it comes to receive and digest complicated messages

For example, ‘ethnic cleansing’ instead of ‘genocide’. The term, ‘ethnic cleansing’ does not clearly represent to people’s mind about the horror of mass murder. The filtration of words made by euphemisms has improvised the language and make it sounds less inappropriate but in fact euphemisms has already violated the real images of genocide. It makes the lies and violent sounds truthful and acceptable. Euphemisms todays is used to be mask on something which is the negative sides of euphemisms where the truth is being hidden. The abuse of euphemisms has driven people towards intellectual dishonesty (Noronha,2013). It turns people into ignorance as it make us to blindly close our eyes to the human horrific realities. This is somehow, to some extent euphemisms give out negative