Ways to soften the blow: Euphemisms from around the world

My last column was on colourful insults, and that’s one way to go. This week, let’s wander down the gentler route. A euphemism is used to hint at an event or emotion considered too delicate, embarrassing or unpleasant to speak of more plainly.

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There are euphemisms to indicate that someone is really old, short, or large. There are others to indicate death, pregnancy, or stupidity. There are many for different functions of the body. There’s even a growing number for the increasingly common experience of being laid off.

Let’s begin with euphemisms for the standard trip to the loo. “Powder one’s nose” is perhaps the most widely used in English, but Britain alone has a string of alternatives. One can “check the price of wheat in Chicago” (a euphemism from the county of Fife); empty the ashtrays (Manchester); empty the teapot to make room for the next cup of tea (Buckinghamshire); see what time it is on the market clock (Bedfordshire); shake the dew from one’s orchid (Cumbria); water the horses (Cheshire) or, rather alarmingly, wring out one’s socks (Kent).

Travel further afield and death is called by some rather strange names. “Pass on” and “meet one’s maker” from the English are practically dull. Vibrant alternatives include: to meet one’s Waterloo (Australian Slang); go trumpet-cleaning (the trumpeter being the archangel Gabriel); chuck seven (since a dice cube cannot go beyond six); coil up one’s ropes (British naval slang); or buy the farm. It is believed that this last term for death was coined by soldiers in the US Air Force, to indicate that a pilot had crashed into a field.

Around the world, a range of cultures also correlate death with the spoon. There’s: stick one’s spoon in the wall (British slang, dating to the 1800s); pass along one’s spoon (German); jab one’s spoon into the ceiling (Afrikaans), all indicating death by implying that life’s essential act, that of eating, has ceased.

Today, a large number of phrases has emerged to let others know, without seeming cruel, that someone has been let go of, or “made redundant”. One is said to have been handed one’s cards; become a consultant; been deselected; excluded; offered a voluntary relocation; or been sent on gardening leave.

In this, as in other things, the most indecipherable euphemisms come from within the corporate world. The firing of employees is described in a number of self-forgiving ways: as skill-mix adjustment, executive outplacement, decruitment, delayering, destaffing. Employees may be said to have “taken early release”. And there are, of course, the old chestnuts of “retrenching”, “rightsizing” and “internal reorganisation”.

Brings the mind back, full circle, to some of the insults from last month’s column, doesn’t it?

(Adam Jacot de Boinod is the author of The Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World)