Contamination and Camouflage in Euphemisms

Abstract

Communicators may representationally displace an unpleasant topic by avoiding direct reference to it (e.g., she died) in favor of a euphemism (she's no longer with us). How does a euphemism's displacement capacity change over its career in the vernacular? Linguists have assumed that this capacity deteriorates as euphemisms become conventional and thus “contaminated” by their association with negative referents. In contrast, communicative pragmatics theory suggests that conventionality may confer camouflage-like properties to euphemisms, enabling addressees to process them in a mindless fashion. We report two studies investigating these divergent theoretical accounts. Study 1 explored the relationship between perceptions of euphemisms’ familiarity and politeness. Study 2 examined the attributional consequences of conventional and unconventional euphemistic encodings of an ostensibly taboo topic. Our results contradict the associative contamination hypothesis and comport with the camouflage hypothesis.

Keywords:

• Euphemism
• Politeness
• Idioms
• Pragmatics
• Sociolinguistics

The results of Study 2 were presented at the 2004 Winter Discourse Conference in Jackson Hole, WY.

The results of Study 2 were presented at the 2004 Winter Discourse Conference in Jackson Hole, WY.

Acknowledgments

We thank John Daly, Dedre Gentner, Diane Kobrynowicz, Mark Knapp, Laurie Lewis, Anita Vangelisti, and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions on previous drafts of this manuscript.

Notes

The results of Study 2 were presented at the 2004 Winter Discourse Conference in Jackson Hole, WY.

1. The underdetermined, context-dependent nature of linguistic meaning makes it difficult to make a precise distinction between literal and nonliteral reference (Carston, 2002; Glucksberg, Keysar, & McGlone, 1992). We use the term “literal” here to refer to terms that are commonly recognized as impartial, clinical labels for distasteful topics.

2. The first-instance-in-print estimates are distributed across items, not participants, and so we computed this correlation treating only items as a random factor (Clark, 1973).

3. The expressions use the bathroom and heed Nature's call are typically used to refer to urination or defecation. However, either could be used in principle to refer to another bodily function, such as vomiting. Although we chose the term urinate as our literal control, we elected to count mentions of urination, defecation, or vomiting as valid references in light of this ambiguity.

4. Although participants were specifically instructed to record all the events they recalled from the narrative, it is possible that some chose not to mention all of their recollections, including those about the target event. For the sake of argument, this state of affairs might have occurred when a participant found the target event too objectionable to mention in their record. Note, however, that there was a high recall rate (87%) in the literal encoding condition, in which the event was encoded with the relatively blunt term urinate. Thus we consider explaining different recall rates in terms of “intentional omission” as possible but not particularly plausible.

5. We thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this question about our findings.

6. We also take issue with his assumption that these and other “politically correct” ethnic terms are euphemisms of the same stripe as use the bathroom. For the sake of rebuttal, however, we let the assumption stand.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew S. McGlone

Matthew S. McGlone (Ph.D., Princeton University) is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin

Gary Beck

Gary A. Beck (M.A., University of Rhode Island) is a doctoral student in UT-Austin's graduate program in interpersonal communication

Abigail Pfiester

R. Abigail Pfiester (M.A., Cornell University) is a doctoral student in UT-Austin's graduate program in interpersonal communication