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Updated: June 19, 2025
People accustomed to a vitiated atmosphere are not aware of its foulness. How long it takes a nation, for instance, to awake to consciousness of some national crime, even when the nation is 'Christian'! And how men get perfectly sophisticated as to their own sins, and have all manner of euphemisms for them!
For the latter reason the Dayak will not allude by name to the small pox, but will call it "the chief" or "jungle-leaves"; the Laplander speaks of the bear as the "old man with the fur coat"; in Annam the tiger is called "grandfather" or "Lord"; while in more civilized communities such sayings are current as "talk of the Devil, and he will appear," with which we may also compare such expressions as "Eumenides" or "gracious ones" for the Furies, and other like euphemisms.
Unless we shudderingly recoil from contact with the bad in our own lives, and refuse to christen it with deceptive euphemisms when we meet it in social and civil life, we shall but feebly grasp, and slackly hold, that which is good.
"I think if I had the naming of the animals over again, this morning, I shouldn't call snakes 'snakes'; should you, Eve?" laughed Basil in intricate acknowledgment of his happiness. "O no, Adam; we'd look out all the most graceful euphemisms in the newspapers, and we wouldn't hurt the feelings of a spider."
Especially among the poorer or less respectable people, to whom the idea of crime becomes familiar, the use of slang euphemisms on this subject grows up. A person for whom the police are searching is "wanted." A man who is hanged "swings."
The word euphemeîte, "speak fair," was used as a warning to worshippers in Greek temples, in the belief that the speaking of an unfortunate word might bring disaster instead of blessing from the sacrifice. Every day, and often in a day, we use euphemisms.
These expressions may seem very dreadful to more refined people, but their use really comes from the same desire to be indulgent which leads more educated people to use euphemisms to cover up as far as possible the faults of their friends. Again, misfortunes which come not from outside happenings but from some defect in a person's mind and body are often the subject of euphemisms.
One of their jobs was to buy up, at an enormous discount, old and discredited claims against the Treasury, dating from the Fronde, which, when held by the right parties, were paid in full, a species of fraud known by various euphemisms in the purest of republics.
It keeps those grim words for the reality, the separation of the soul from God; and it only exceptionally uses them for the shadow and the symbol, the physical fact of the parting of the man from the house which here he has dwelt in. But the reason why Christianity uses these periphrases or metaphors, these euphemisms for death, is the opposite of the reason why the world uses them.
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