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Results tagged with euphemisms
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user 36232
Questions about harmless rewordings of potentially offensive words or phrases.
9
votes
Accepted
Is there a politically correct term for illiterate people?
My impression from a quick Google Books search is that the term nonreaders has often been used in recent years as a neutral way to identify persons who cannot read.
From Ronald Farrar, Mass Communicat …
- 169k
6
votes
Accepted
How did "yours truly" become a euphemism for "I" or "me"?
Nowadays people tend to separate the formal closing (or subscription) of a letter from flow of the preceding main text of the letter. But it was not always thus. In the 18th and 19th centuries, many l …
- 169k
5
votes
Why does "blue blazes" specify the color blue, and what is the origin of this expression as ...
The earliest instance of "blue blazes" that I've been able to find occurs in Piomingo [John Robinson], The Savage (1810). In fact, it appears twice in this book, once as "the blue blazes of Tophet" an …
- 169k
4
votes
Accepted
What is the meaning of an expression "Tufted titmouse"?
Internet searches for "tough titmouse" produce very little of substance aside from discussions of episode 4 of season 2 of The Good Doctor, which is titled "Tough Titmouse" and initially aired on Octo …
- 169k
4
votes
Euphemisms for rejection (man-women and vice versa)
A number of indirect or figurative expressions for rejection exist, but I can't think of any single-word alternatives that aren't either just as brutal as "rejected" (for example, "dumped") or excessi …
- 169k
3
votes
Accepted
Is "ethnic cleansing" an inappropriate euphemism if mass murder isn't involved?
The term appears to have arisen in 1992 in connection with Serbian policy against its Croation and (subsequently) Bosnian minority populations. Some books of the period 1993–1995 explicitly equate the …
- 169k
2
votes
"Birds and bees" origins
Christine Ammer, The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms (1997) has this entry for "the birds and the bees":
birds and the bees, the A euphemism for sex education, especially when taught inform …
- 169k
1
vote
In the Ozarks, why was a pregnant woman "with squirrel"?
point that may help readers make sense of the adoption of "with squirrel" as a regionalism is that people in the Ozarks region (in the first half of the twentieth century, anyway) were notably prone to euphemisms …
- 169k
1
vote
"Flitter lip!" to mean 'darn'
I mentioned a few years ago (in a comment beneath the posted question) that there is one relatively old instance of flitter-lip in a brief news item in the [Winnsboro, South Carolina] Fairfield News a …
- 169k
0
votes
Origin of the word “boner”
The earliest slang dictionary I've been able to find that includes an entry for boner is James Farmer & William Henley, Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present (1890), which has this brief entry:
Bo …
- 169k