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Quotes About Euphemism

Le temps libre est principalement consacré à se préparer pour le travail, à revenir du travail, à surmonter la fatigue du travail. Le temps libre est un euphémisme qui désigne la manière dont la main-d'oeuvre se transporte à ses propres frais pour se rendre au labeur et assume l'essentiel de sa propre maintenance et de ses réparations.
~ Bob Black
Thoughtfully or thoughtlessly he had left the keys in the ignition, and I switched on the radio. It was tuned to WQED. A local arts reporter I didn't particularly admire was interviewing old Q. about his life and work and personal demons. I reflected for a moment on the journalistic euphemism that allowed personal demons to writers who were only fucked up.
~ Michael Chabon
dried cow pies—known euphemistically and rather charmingly as "surface coal.
~ Bill Bryson
Vuoto e noia: che eufemismo. Provavo la desolazione più nera. Desolazione disperazione e depressione. Ci sono altri modi di guardare a tutto ciò? In fondo, una inquietudine di dimensioni tali è un oggetto di lusso. Bisogna essere ben nutriti, vestiti e avere una bella casa, se si vuole aver tempo per tutta questa autocommiserazione.
~ Susanna Kaysen
Why even call it a fuck? Why not be clear and call it a seminal emission in a preapproved orifice?
~ Sylvia Day
It made sense. But rich folk, they had a different word for the crapper. They'd call it a "commode" or a "washroom." That way, when someone asked for the crapper, they knew it was a person they needed to oppress.
~ Brandon Sanderson
A composite is a euphemism for a lie. It's disorderly. It's dishonest and it's not journalism.
~ Fred W. Friendly
The modern hallucination in which women are trapped or trap themselves is similarly rigid, cruel, and euphemistically painted. Contemporary culture directs attention to imagery of the Iron Maiden, while censoring real women's faces and bodies.
~ Naomi Wolf
Dated" in Selah's book, being a euphemism for "had enthusiastic and frequent sex with".
~ Charlaine Harris
Miss von Osterloh had looked through it once during an idle fifteen minutes and pronunce it quite sophisticated, which veredict was her euphemism for inhumanly boring.
~ Thomas Mann
Everybody out on the sidewalk is a pedestrian Mercedes, wallowing in entitlement—colliding, snarling, shoving ahead without even the hollow-to-begin-with local euphemism "Excuse me.
~ Thomas Pynchon
What about supplies and stuff we can't scavenge from other planes?" asks John, his leg bouncing more fiercely than usual. "If we can't get cash from the front office to buy it, we'll have to creatively find it." Creatively finding is Connor's euphemism for stealing.
~ Neal Shusterman
gentlemen's clubs—now there was a ridiculous euphemism
~ Chris Bohjalian
Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table.
~ George Shultz
Terminological inexactitude
~ Winston Churchill
How does hanky-panky translate to sex? Who comes up with words like that? Probably people who don't have sex
~ J.D. Robb
To defend the indefensible, George Orwell once observed, political figures employ language that consists largely of "euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.
~ Jack Cashill
Bulshytt: (1) In Fluccish of the late Praxic Age and early Reconstitution, a derogatory term for false speech in general, esp. knowing and deliberate falsehood or obfuscation. (2) In Orth, a more technical and clinical term denoting speech (typically but not necessarily commercial or political) that employs euphemism, convenient vagueness, numbing repetition, and other such rhetorical subterfuges to create the impression that something has been said.
~ Neal Stephenson
This is made additionally problematic by the tendency of modern medicine to fall back on the use of euphemistic
~ Christopher Hitchens
The bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about 'the west,' to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state.
~ Christopher Hitchens
Johnny Dandy starring Blake Headley and Patricia De Hammond had been running on Broadway at the Divinity Theater since Memorial Day weekend. Critics had meted their blows and yet. The dialogue and action were so shrouded in euphemism, so opaque in meaning and intention, alternately dull and
~ Colson Whitehead
There it was again, another strange usage. 'We had words.' Everyone has words...What a useless euphemism. The phrases that people used to make things prettier never worked.
~ Laura Lippman
Mick, I love your tiger. Which isn't a euphemism for your penis. Though I really like that too.
~ Lauren Dane
He had led missions inside China before, but always for the purpose of sabotage or intelligence gathering, or "involuntary high officer force reduction," Peter's mostly-ironic euphemism for assassination.
~ Orson Scott Card