Euphemisms The usual assumption is that most of our standard for death, reproduction, sex, and other physical functions come from the Victorian era concerning Victorianism bosom, limb, and unmentionables from Victoria’s reign. But there is no guarantee that the dictionary-maker or compiler of euphemisms has found the earliest example. In China, euphemism is closely connected with taboo words or behaviors. The earliest recording of things on taboo started with the Spring and Autumn and Warring Period according to ZuoZhuan. Chinese Culture also has a custom of respect for one’s ancestors, one family’s ancestors are sometimes treated as holy beings. Euphemisms may be formed in a number of ways. Over time, circumlocutions become recognized as established euphemisms for particular words or ideas. To alter the pronunciation or spelling of a taboo word (such as a swear word) to form a euphemism is known as taboo deformation. There is an astonishing number of taboo deformations in English, of which many refer to the infamous four-letter words. In American English, words that are unacceptable on television, such as fuck, may be represented by deformations such as freak — even in children’s cartoons. Some examples of rhyming slang may serve the same purpose — to call a person a berk sounds less offensive than to call a person a cunt, though berk is short for Berkeley Hunt, which rhymes with cunt. Bureaucracies such as the military and large corporations frequently spawn euphemisms of a more deliberate nature. Organizations coin doublespeak expressions to describe objectionable actions in terms that seem neutral or inoffensive. For example, a term used in the past for contamination by radioactive isotopes was Sunshine units. Execution is an established euphemism referring to the act of putting a person to death, with or without judicial process. It originally referred to the execution, i.e., the carrying out, of a death warrant, which is an authorization to a sheriff, prison warden, or other official to put a named person to death. In legal usage, execution can still refer to the carrying out of other types of orders. Likewise, lethal injection itself may be considered a euphemism for putting the convict to death by poisoning. Abortion originally meant premature birth, and came to mean birth before viability. The term “abort” was extended to mean any kind of premature ending, such as aborting the launch of a rocket. Euphemisms have developed around the original meaning. Abortion, by itself, came to mean “induced abortion” or “elective abortion” exclusively. Hence the parallel term spontaneous abortion, an “act of nature”, was dropped in favor of the more neutral-sounding miscarriage. Industrial unpleasantness such as pollution may be toned down to outgassing or runoff — descriptions of physical processes rather than their damaging consequences. Some of this may simply be the application of precise technical terminology in the place of popular usage, but beyond precision, the advantage of technical terminology may be its lack of emotional undertones and the likelihood that the general public (at least initially) will not recognize it for what it really is; the disadvantage being the lack of real-life context. Terms like waste and wastewater are also avoided in favor of terms such as byproduct, recycling, reclaimed water and effluent. In the oil industry, oil-based drilling muds were simply renamed organic phase drilling muds, where organic phase is a euphemism for “oil”. However, this kind of “euphemism” is not necessarily malicious in the sense that labeling an individual byproduct stream “waste” can have severe legal consequences, such as additional taxes or prohibition of transport or export.