(n.) A figure in which a harts or indelicate word or expression is softened; a way of describing an offensive thing by an inoffensive expression; a mild name for something disagreeable.
Example Sentences:
(1) 9.41pm BST Dodgers 0 - Cardinals 0, bottom of the 2nd The "demeaning euphemism for overweight" Matt Adams lines out to Adrian Gonzalez for the second out of the inning.
(2) General Bantz Craddock, who instituted the restraint chair and twice-daily intubation in 2006 , said that he designed it to make hunger-striking less " convenient " – a not terribly subtle euphemism for more painful – and that "pretty soon [after these practices were introduced]…they decided it wasn’t worth it."
(3) To avoid discussing the hunger strike and its rationale, they introduced a euphemism when asked about it: “long-term non-religious fasting”.
(4) I liked working there in the "people department" (a new euphemism for the women's section in the age of feminism), since it offered handy distractions from the horror of the blank page.
(5) Craving boldness is too often a euphemism for wishing Labour's predicament were something other than what it is; that there was a way to promise immediate improvement in everyone's lives without giving them money.
(6) She's both a "certain type of woman" (divorced single mothers must only be referred to in euphemism) and an object of desire.
(7) On Tuesday Khamenei used the expression "heroic leniency", which is being interpreted as a euphemism for a softer stance on foreign policy.
(8) And they gave us the word “euphemism” in the first place – “to use a favourable word in place of an inauspicious one”.
(9) In fact, the word 'torture' does not appear anywhere, nor even the preferred diplomatic euphemism, 'ill-treatment'.
(10) There were euphemisms (“an incident”, “an inappropriate action on my part”); there were vague and reassuring references to the woman (“she has accepted my apology”); and there were mind-your-own-business obfuscations (“a deeply personal business”).
(11) Political rhetoric now as in Orwell's day exploits not only euphemism ("austerity") but dysphemism ("skivers") and loaded metaphor ("fiscal cliff"): in our time, weaponised soundbites are deliberately engineered to smuggle the greatest amount of persuasion into the smallest space, to be virally replicated on rolling news.
(12) There is a serious risk that, sooner rather than later, “self-employment” will simply be a euphemism for regular work in which the employee is unprotected by minimum-wage legislation or any other workplace entitlements.
(13) The NSC will also be put in charge of a £1.3bn prosperity fund that will focus on issues like “improving the business climate” – a term too often used as a euphemism for the promotion of ideologically-driven policies like the privatisation of public services .
(14) Labelling Matters , a campaign set up by Compassion in World Farming and the RSPCA among others, is calling for labels that discard euphemisms in favour, for instance, of “intensive indoor” for pork from pigs that never go outside and “permanently housed” for dairy cows that never graze in fields.
(15) According to state media, Ji Jianye is being investigated for "severe violations of discipline and law" – a euphemism for embezzlement, bribery and other official abuses.
(16) But what this kind of legislation would do is promote “information-sharing” – a euphemism for cutting a giant hole in our privacy laws that allow companies like Sony or 20th Century Fox (or Google or Facebook) to hand over all sorts of our personal information to the government with no legal process whatsoever.
(17) Work was a widely used euphemism for killing during the genocide.
(18) "Dressing for pleasure" and "fun fashion" get a bad rap, especially for women in their middle age, as it is generally assumed that this is a euphemism for women dressing like clowns and not realising that, at their age (huff, huff), they should be wearing beige cashmere.
(19) Records of military and congressional investigations into the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre illustrate that "scalping" and other terms were euphemisms for Colorado Volunteers mutilating Cheyenne people and wearing and displaying genitalia, fetuses, and other "battle trophies".
(20) Apart from using the words "organic" as a euphemism for "traditional", his ideas seem to have matured little in the 25 years.
Genteelism
Definition:
Example Sentences:
(1) Cleeve Hill was once the site of a 'bawdy' racecourse, before it was moved down the hill into genteel Cheltenham.
(2) While the opening tranche of "tales" derive from the work of forgotten contemporary humorists, the pieces of London reportage that he began to contribute to the Morning Chronicle in autumn 1834 ("Gin Shops", "Shabby-Genteel People", "The Pawnbroker's Shop") are like nothing else in pre-Victorian journalism: bantering and hard-headed by turns, hectic and profuse, falling over themselves to convey every last detail of the metropolitan front-line from which Dickens sent back his dispatches.
(3) An hour north of Paris in genteel Chantilly, England have prepared in unusually low-key fashion two years after a humiliating World Cup in which they were sent packing after two matches.
(4) Gustave's beatific smile and genteel demeanour work harmoniously with the purple hotel uniforms (Anderson does love a man in uniform).
(5) How popular would "Boris Island" – the mayor's fantasy airport in the Thames estuary – be in Clacton and genteel Frinton?
(6) From the late 1950s to the 1970s, the new, subsidised British drama was making waves at the Royal Court Theatre and in the regions - and finding critical support from commentators weary of the genteel West End theatre.
(7) Last week, the UK Statistics Authority gave him a reprimand that broke from the genteel language of the civil service.
(8) They signed Bush expressly as the first major British female exponent of this genteel genre.
(9) It is another to be given a genteel kicking by David Hare (who wrote in this newspaper last week that the Labour leader was worse than Neil Kinnock).
(10) Today Paris is still the different cities encapsulated by Hugo and Manet; Manet's chic Left Bank haunts are as fashionable and relatively genteel as 150 years ago.
(11) The wild, unstable undercliff on the Dorset-Devon border provided John Fowles with the perfect landscape to contrast with the genteel world of Lyme Regis in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (“In summer it is the nearest this country can offer to a tropical jungle”).
(12) This being a story about powerful, litigious people, it was composed in befittingly genteel terms; the pair are described as having a "friendship".
(13) It's a sleepy little town, beloved by genteel visitors who come for its microclimate – said to be 3C warmer than the rest of France – and exotic gardens.
(14) Norbert Smith: A Life was a brilliant satirical one-off on the history of British cinema through the eyes of a genteel luvvie who had seen it all, from 30s Will Hay comedies through to swinging 60s thrillers.
(15) There, his mother, in her mid-30s, dressed in a spotless white blouse, and with a Lady Diana-like haircut, was reading a newspaper and sipping from a genteel white teacup.
(16) She was born Muriel Camberg to a Jewish engineer father and an English, music-teacher mother, in the genteel Edinburgh inner suburb of Bruntsfield.
(17) But in the summer of 1983 this genteel corner, bypassed by shoppers and tourists, found itself a focus of national interest.
(18) An acrimonious divorce, scandal over a young model and nude photos at pool parties – Silvio Berlusconi's family traumas might not seem the ideal backdrop for the genteel spouses' programme at a G8 summit.
(19) And the genteel visitors who first inspected it had no means of knowing that even as expert an anatomist as Stubbs had got some details wrong.
(20) In the genteel, cultivated and fashionable crowd, Manet painted himself and his friends: the poets Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, and composer Jacques Offenbach.