Euphemisms (from the Greek euphēmismos, meaning ‘speaking well’) are words or phrases used as softer or less direct substitutes for expressions deemed to be too harsh, blunt, embarrassing or offensive. A feature of language ever since the Ancient Greeks first named the phenomena 3,000 years ago, euphemisms are tailor-made for the sort of people that have become more and more abundant in recent times: the censorious, the dictatorial, the proscriptive, the narrow-minded, the illiberal, the intolerant, the reactionary, the puritanical, the moralistic, the self-righteous, the infantile, the prudish, the fuss-pot, the prig, the fogey, the hypocrite and the plain stupid. With all these various unhinged personality types emboldened, encouraged, ratified and normalised by the far-right internet algorithms of American Big Tech, it’s little wonder that the euphemism is now an out of control weapon wielded by the self-appointed thought police of the culture wars.

For centuries euphemisms were largely harmless, nothing more than the twee pussyfooting of squeamish old maids who required smelling salts if they overheard so much as an innocuous “damn” when someone stubbed their toe. Such delicate souls featured as objects of ridicule in countless works of literature, such as Tartuffe in the eponymous 1664 play by Molière (1622-1673), Mrs Grundy in Speed the Plough (1798) by Thomas Morton (1764-1838) and Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) by Charles Dickens (1812-1970). But the urge to impose compulsory ‘respectability’ didn’t go away, as epitomised by Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) who went as far as publishing a ten-volume edition of the complete works of Shakespeare in which any word with a hint of impropriety was simply erased, no matter how much his silly sanitising thoroughly mutilated and degraded the Bard’s sublime poetry. In the Victorian era the forces of uptight prissiness and starchy repression fought many a battle against free expression, going to such ludicrous extremes to clamp down on anything considered remotely unseemly that, for example, in many bourgeois circles the word ‘leg’ was judged far too sexually provocative to be uttered in the presence of ‘ladies’ and so was replaced by ‘limb’.

During the 20th century, as the creeping Jesus, bible-bashing tendency increasingly retreated the resulting vacancy was swiftly filled by new battalions of straightlaced censors on permanent look out for every possible word that could be accused, however nebulously, of being ‘offensive’. Thus was set in motion what has become known as the ‘euphemism treadmill’, whereby words are declared taboo and replaced by supposedly inoffensive euphemisms which in turn rapidly became taboo themselves due to the incessant and time-worn linguistic process of ‘semantic change’. I am spoiled for examples of this mechanism in action – the most common are those dealing with topics humans are desperate to avoid:

●Lunatic → Berserk → Insane → Mad → Deranged → Psychopath → Mentally ill→ Neurodivergent
●Shellshock → Battle fatigue → Operational Exhaustion → Post-traumatic stress disorder → PTSD
●Idiot → Imbecile → Moron → Retarded → Learning difficulty → Special needs → Asperger’s → Autism → Obsessive-compulsive → OCD
●Bog → Shithouse → Privy → Water closet → Toilet → Gents/Ladies → Lavatory→ Loo → Bathroom → Restroom
●Great pox → Syphilis/Gonorrhea → Venereal disease → VD → Sexually transmitted disease → STD → Sexually transmitted infection → STI
●Cripple → Lame → Deformed → Spastic → Handicapped → Disabled → Differently abled → Person with impairments
●Dead → Called → Taken → Crossed over → Departed → At peace → Passed away → Passed on → Passed

Generally, such cyclical euphemisms have good intentions – trying to avoid hurting or belittling people, or to further progressive causes, or just to be polite and respectful – but invariably all that is achieved is the creation of a new insult that forces the readily offended to spawn a new euphemism. Moreover plenty of euphemisms now have outright bad intentions as propaganda tools, calculated disinformation, duplicitous whitewashing and the rewriting of history. To cite just a few examples: the Nazi’s ‘final solution’ (genocide); the Northern Irish ‘troubles’ (civil war); Vladimir Putin’s ‘special military operation’ (the invasion of and, so far, four-year war against Ukraine), and the torrent of deception and evasion generated by those unrivalled masters of the euphemism, the US military, such as ‘collateral damage’ (civilian deaths), ‘servicing the target’ (bombing), ‘regime change’ (coup), ‘intervention’, ‘incursion’ and ‘liberation’ (invasion), ‘defense’ (belligerent warmongering), ‘extraordinary rendition’ (kidnapping), ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ (torture) – and on and on ad infinitum to Trump’s floundering gibberish of today: the US simply cannot face the facts of its endless monumental failures and so must continually bastardize language in an attempt to stay one linguistic step ahead of the truth.

In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), George Orwell (1903-1950) named the policy of systematic lying ‘doublespeak’, defined as language that deliberately obscures, distorts and reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak amounts to a euphemism variation particularly applicable to those who have most to gain and most to lose by lying: politicians and corporations. So accustomed have we all become to the routine lies of politicians that lying brazenly and without the slightest qualm is now more or less a politician’s job description and as a result virtually all trust, decency and shared principles have been wiped out, leaving shattered societies such as the appalling UK of staggering inequality, obscene private wealth, shattered public services, toxic cynicism, immense poverty and decultured, dumbed-down ignorance. You only have to listen to current PM Kier Starmer to hear a man who lies without knowing he’s even doing it as an instinctive, knee-jerk response to everything. Take Peter Mandelson. According to Starmer he was completely unaware of Mandelson’s very well-known terrible track record of scandals in public office and associations with billionaires, crooks and hostile foreign powers when he appointed him as ambassador to the USA, the UK’s highest diplomatic post. To buy this giant lie we are required to believe that Starmer has lived on a desert island for the last 30 years and, should we doubt that, Starmer reckons he has a sure-fire way of wriggling off the hook: by referring to Mandelson by his surname only in an angry, adversarial tone. This manoeuvre depends on there being plenty of people with the attention span of a gnat who won’t remember that a few days before Starmer sacked him for being the best pal of a convicted paedophile he was referring to him as “Pete” in tones of affectionate warmth. No single euphemism was involved in this example; instead the entire web of interlocking lies pouring out of Starmer was in effect a super-euphemism of doublespeak with knobs on.

Yes, that old phoney the euphemism just keeps on evolving as the human race sinks deeper into depravity and hurtles towards oblivion. Another twist comes via the identity politics trap set by the far-right and obligingly walked into blindly by the so-called ‘left’ that long since gave up on the only politics that matter: the politics of class, of economics, of self-determination and of anti-imperialism. As far-right American ideologue Steve Bannon put it, “If the left is focused on race and identity we can crush them” – and that is precisely what has happened. Persuading people to define themselves by non-existent, imaginary identifiers has castrated real issues like the class struggle and let the planet-wrecking, society-slaughtering oligarchs, autocrats and fascists get away with murder. For instance, ‘race’ is an artificial concept, an invented fantasy and a political construct that is neither objectively verifiable nor a biological reality. It is an always untrue, rigid definition cooked up by colonialism, slavery and capitalism to serve the interests of those in power and justify oppression. Guess what: WE ARE ALL MONGRELS.

Likewise, there is no such thing as the generational identities that are continually referred to by the mainstream media. ‘Boomers’, ‘Gen X’, ‘Millennials’, ‘Gen Z’, ‘Generation Alpha’ and so on are as nonsensical as the signs of the zodiac that divide humans into 12 categories determined by birthday. They are merely marketing strategies and business jargon originally devised by US ad agencies in the 1980s to lazily slot everyone into ageist demographic pigeon holes with a pseudo-scientific veneer in order to sell stuff. Guess what: YOUR AGE IS NOT AN IDENTITY.

And neither is your sex an identity, nor your gender, nor your sexual orientation, nor your skin pigmentation, nor your religion, nor the size of your feet for that matter…Guess what: IDENTITY DIVULGES A CHARACTERISTIC; BEING, FOR EXAMPLE, A MAN DIVULGES ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

Everywhere you look another euphemism rears its inane presence in one way or another. I don’t need to give examples of all the many lingering residues of religiosity that persist in mincing words to avoid risking a blasphemous breach of the Third Commandment by mentioning ‘God’, or all the examples of ‘swear words’ childishly altered to pander to the long-gone easily shocked, or all the coy metaphors used as pointless alternatives for bodily functions and sex acts, or the multitude of euphemisms generated by business, from ‘let go’ instead of ‘sack’ to ‘downsize’ instead of ‘make redundant’. Why can’t people call a digging implement a spade? After all, every word is in the Chambers Dictionary and, anyhow, they’re only strings of letters for fuck’s sake heaven’s sake crying out loud…