(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.
Idiom
Definition:
(n.) The syntactical or structural form peculiar to any language; the genius or cast of a language.
(n.) An expression conforming or appropriate to the peculiar structural form of a language; in extend use, an expression sanctioned by usage, having a sense peculiar to itself and not agreeing with the logical sense of its structural form; also, the phrase forms peculiar to a particular author.
(n.) Dialect; a variant form of a language.
Example Sentences:
(1) Case studies of two anorectic women from Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota, show that for some anorectics self-starvation is encoded in religious idioms and symbols about the body, food, and self.
(2) Ali Motahari, an influential MP, said after Trump’s win that his presidency was to Iran’s advantage because Democrats “would chop your head with cotton”, a Persian idiom which means killing someone with kindness, and reflecting a view that the Islamic Republic has historically coped better with the Republicans.
(3) This study compared the comprehension of 20 idioms of normal children with children exhibiting mild mental retardation.
(4) Our hypothesis is that they can reach an idiomatic competence if idioms are presented within a rich informational environment allowing children to grasp their figurative sense.
(5) A contemporary idiom blurs not only Flaubert's precision but the shocking and revolutionary nature of the work, which makes more sense when set back in its own time and context.
(6) Six experiments examined why some idioms can be syntactically changed and still retain their figurative meanings (e.g., John laid down the law can be passivized as The law was laid down by John), while other idioms cannot be syntactically altered without losing their figurative meanings (e.g., John kicked the bucket cannot be passivized into The bucket was kicked by John).
(7) An attempt is made to show how personal concerns of the dreamers are mediated through the culturally shared idiom of the saint.
(8) "A dialogue of the deaf", as it has been translated into an English idiom, is a conversation between two people who cannot listen to each other.
(9) But they were not tired-and-emotional, and for such mannerly foreigners to have been given a practical definition of that local idiom would have been gilding the lily.
(10) In Experiment 1, idioms referring to the same temporal stage of a conceptual prototype were judged to be more similar in meaning than idioms referring to different temporal stages.
(11) These results suggest that adults with unilateral brain damage can activate and retrieve familiar idiomatic forms, and that their idiom-interpretation deficits most likely reflect impairment at some later stage of information processing.
(12) Experiment 3 was designed to investigate children's production of idioms as compared to the comprehension abilities explored in experiments 1 and 2.
(13) Our thesis was that the syntactic behavior of idioms is determined, to a large extent, but speakers' assumptions about the way in which parts of idioms contribute to their figurative interpretations as a whole.
(14) By establishing a broad understanding of the problem of knowledge, this new view of epistemology is developed within the idiom of each psychiatric approach.
(15) When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.'
(16) Although this idiom is necessarily expressed through language, it is more than language.
(17) Hickman parries this by pointing to such non-rock Record Store Day releases as a 7-inch single by One Direction and three albums of classical music conducted by Herbert von Karajan, but it seems to me that the point is almost incontrovertible: to use the vocabulary of the 1980s, much of the energy that goes into the event is unmistakably rockist, and the festivities often feel like a day-long benefit for an entire musical idiom: Live Aid meets the Antiques Roadshow, with the aim of keeping the guitars ringing out for another year.
(18) Dolezal does not discuss her own ethnicity in detail in her numerous writings on civil rights issues, but in several pieces she uses idioms such as “our cultural memory” when speaking about African American history.
(19) "You have a political and media elite who have an idiom by which they describe politics.
(20) Experiment 6 showed that the metaphoric information reflected in the lexical makeup of idioms also determined the metaphoric appropriateness of idioms in certain contexts.