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A euphemism is a word or phrase which people use in place of terms which they consider to be more disagreeable or offensive to themselves and/or to their audience. The linguistic taboo may be an unspeakable name for a deity, such as Persephone, Hecate, Nemesis or Yahweh. When a phrase becomes a euphemism, its literal meaning is often dropped. Euphemisms are also used to hide unpleasant ideas, even when the literal term for them is not necessarily offensive. This type of euphemism is used in public relations and politics, where it is known as doublespeak.
The methods of historical linguistics can reveal traces of taboo deformations. Several are known to have occurred in Indo-European. Examples include the original Indo-European words for bear (*rktos), wolf (*wlkwos), and deer (originally, hart). In different Indo-European languages, each of these words have difficult etymologies because of taboo deformations—a euphemism was substituted for the original, and the form of the original word no longer occurs in the language. An example is the Slavic root for bear—*medu-ed-—which means "honey eater".
Euphemisms can eventually become taboo words themselves through a process for which the linguist Steven PinkerSteven Pinker (born September 18 1954, in Montreal, Canada) is a psychologist at Harvard University and a writer of popular science books. He was a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology fo has coined the term euphemism treadmill, which is comparable to Gresham's Law in economicsEconomics is the social science studying how society uses its limited resources to meet desires and wants. Put otherwise, economics studies what, how and for whom society produces. This involves analyzing the production, distribution and consumption of go. In this process, over the course of time, a word that was originally adopted as a euphemism acquires all the negative connotations of its referent, and has to be replaced by a substitute. In extreme cases, the process can happen many times, and indeed may still be happening. For example,toilet room, itself a euphemism, was replaced with bathroom and water closet, which were replaced (respectively) with rest room and W.C.. Funeral director replaced morticianA mortician (also known as a funeral director or undertaker is someone involved in the business of funeral rites. The job often entails the burial or cremation of the dead. Mortician is also a Death Metal Band from Yonkers New York, revolutionising the wa, which replaced undertaker. Shell shock was later replaced by combat fatigue and then Post-traumatic stress disorder.
Connotations easily change over time. Idiot was once a neutral term, and moron a similar one. Negative senses of a word tend to crowd out neutral ones, so the word retarded was pressed into service to replace them. Now that too is considered rude, and a result, new terms like mentally challenged or special are starting to replace retarded. In a few decades, calling someone special may well be a grave insult. Similar progressions have occurred with
crippled → handicapped → disabled → differently-abled
and
clerk → cashier → sales associate, etc.