United States or Réunion ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The zeal of the knight in the defence of ladies' honour became a satirical euphemism only in the French imitators, who transformed the virginal modesty of the Breton romances into a shameless gallantry so far indeed that these compositions, chaste as they are in the original, became the scandal of the Middle Ages, provoked censures, and were the occasion of the ideas of immorality which, for religious people, still cluster about the name of romance.
Rolleston tells me that Mr. O'Leary's denunciations of "the dynamite section of the Irish people," to use the euphemism of an American journal, "are the only ones ever uttered by an Irish leader, lay or clerical." The day must come, if it be not already close at hand, when the Irish leader of whom this can be truly said, must be felt by his own people to be the one man worthy of their trust.
Again, the faults of our friends and acquaintances, and even the graver offences of criminals, are matters with which we tend to deal lightly. Such offences have gathered a whole throng of euphemisms about them. When we do not like to say boldly that a person is a liar, we say the same thing by means of the euphemism a "stranger to the truth."
"Well, yes, trouble," answered the president, smiling, "but upon my soul, I think it is all animal spirits." "A euphemism for the devil," said Hilary, grimly; "he is the animal part of us, I have been brought up to believe." The president was a wise man, and took another tack. "He has a really remarkable mind, when he chooses to use it.
"Then you know of our daughter's strange er departure?" asked Mr. Gilbert, eagerly scanning Kennedy's face and using a euphemism that would fall less harshly on his wife's ears than the truth. "Indeed, yes," nodded Craig with marked sympathy: "that is, I have read most of what the papers have said. Let me introduce my friend, Mr. Jameson.
It is simply the adoption of the usual terms employed by the soldiers of both sides in speaking to or of each other. We habitually spoke of them and to them, as "Rebels," and "Johnnies ;" they of and to us, as "Yanks," and "Yankees." To have said "Confederates," "Southerners," "Secessionists," or "Federalists," "Unionists," "Northerners" or "Nationalists," would have seemed useless euphemism.
He saw Bebo, and asked him what he was doing in Milan, and Bebo answered that he was a knight errant. This phrase, derived no doubt from the romantic epics then in vogue, was a pretty euphemism for a rogue of Bebo's quality.
The survivors were now wiped out by Napoleon for the benefit of his Rhenish underlings, the spoliation being veiled under the term Mediatization. The euphemism claims a brief explanation.
"It's the poetry of euphemism," Robinson once said to Poppins; but he might as well have talked Greek to him. Robinson often complained that no one understood him; but he forgot that it is the fate of great men generally to work alone, and to be not comprehended.
He had in a dagger to examine, and announced he would come to price it on the morrow, to- day being Sunday; this nicety in a heathen with eight wives surprised me. The dagger was 'good for killing fish, he said roguishly; and was supposed to have his eye upon fish upon two legs. It is at least odd that in Eastern Polynesia fish was the accepted euphemism for the human sacrifice.
Word Of The Day