Euphemisms

Saying What You Mean without Being Mean

Avoiding the harsh, blunt and offensive in a politically correct world. I was going through a box of literally hundreds of columns I have written for three different newspapers going back to the late seventies. I’ve combined observations from a couple of them for this blog— one quite recent and another written more than 27 years ago. The latter explored the impact political correctness was having on our language back in the early 1990’s and the former [...]

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By |2022-01-24T09:09:51+00:00May 12, 2021|Aging, Baldness, Euphemisms, Humor, Political Correctness, Synonyms|

…and Now for a Few Hundred Words about Words

Words may be long, short, misleading, instructive, inspiring or denigrating. It’s time to take a break from current events for something that makes a little more sense. I will revisit a topic I’ve written more about over the years than anything else. I am referring, of course, to the fascinating English language. I don’t know where I’d be without it, even though I have abused, mistreated and even abandoned it on occasion. And yet I still love [...]

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By |2022-01-24T09:09:59+00:00May 27, 2020|English, Euphemisms, Language, Uncategorized, Vocabulary, Words|

Our Language Connects Us to Our Past

We say a lot of things without thinking much about them. And so it is with sayings and phrases we all use— many with ancient origins. A surprising number come from various translations of the Bible and, not so surprisingly, the Bard himself, Shakespeare. Some are regarded as clichés, but that only means that they are durable and we feel comfortable using them. There are so many of them that I can only randomly pick and choose my examples. [...]

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By |2022-01-24T09:10:39+00:00June 8, 2016|Bible, Euphemisms, Language, Sayings|
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