MODERN American speech, while not always clear or correct or turned with much style, is supposed to be uncommonly frank. Witness the current explosion of four-letter words and the explicit discussion ...

George ORWELL’s essay “Politics and the English Language”, published in 1946, took aim at the bureaucrats, academics and hacks who obfuscated their misdeeds in vague, jargon-packed writing.

The security chief of the Chicago Department of Aviation at O’Hare International Airport was fired weeks after the United Airlines scandal Each year, linguists, lexicographers and other language nuts ...

If you’ve been around for a while, you’ve probably heard the phrases 'long in the tooth,' 'getting on in years' or even 'over the hill.' “Euphemism” is defined as “a mild or indirect word or ...

Thanks to marketing, we now express ourselves with euphemisms: words or expressions that are substituted in order to make a blunt or unpleasant truth seem less harsh. Putting a good spin on things, ...

Here is an idea I offer gratis and for nothing to all those socialistically-inclined politicians looking for novel ways to tax people. What I have in mind is a tax on the public utterance of ...

Political debate in the modern world is impossible without memorizing a list of euphemisms, and there is no shortage of public opprobrium for those who talk about certain topics without using them. In ...

“Where is the euphemism?” A college friend used to ask this question to point out the silliness of calling a toilet a bathroom. Euphemism in ordinary speech may be amusing, stilted, or polite, but in ...