(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.
Metaphor
Definition:
(n.) The transference of the relation between one set of objects to another set for the purpose of brief explanation; a compressed simile; e. g., the ship plows the sea.
Example Sentences:
(1) If figurative language is defined as involving intentional violation of conceptual boundaries in order to highlight some correspondence, one must be sure that children credited with that competence have (1) the metacognitive and metalinguistic abilities to understand at least some of the implications of such language (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Nelson, 1974; Nelson & Nelson, 1978), (2) a conceptual organization that entails the purportedly violated conceptual boundaries (Lange, 1978), and (3) some notion of metaphoric tension as well as ground.
(2) Crawford's own poetry was informed by contact with refugees – "I began to think seriously about what it felt like to lose your country or culture, and in my first book, there are one or two poems that are versions of Vietnamese poems" – and scientists, whose vocabulary he initially "stole because it seemed so metaphorically resonant.
(3) As the metaphors we are using to conduct it show, the migration debate in Britain is sorely in need of some perspective.
(4) The spotlight metaphor seems inappropriate for visual attention in a dynamic environment.
(5) In a second experiment schizophrenics were significantly different from the depressives in showing less inclination to select a metaphorical meaning to an ambiguous adjective in a sentence.
(6) Three-quarters of the sample was impaired on at least one of four discourse tests (knowing the alternate meanings of ambiguous words in context; getting the point of figurative or metaphoric expressions; bridging the inferential gaps between events in stereotyped social situations; and producing speech acts that express the apparent intentions of others).
(7) It postulates the need of all sciences to operate with symbols of various levels of abstractions, including, in a very prominent way, metaphors.
(8) This summer, if all goes to plan, the metaphor will be vividly recast: the Globe's stage will itself become a world.
(9) According to the old metaphor of classical cybernetics the brain can be considered as a computer.
(10) And Crash is an extreme metaphor of the dangers that I see lying ahead of us.
(11) The metaphor of clinical work as textual explication, however, creates the expectation that there is a text somewhere to be found.
(12) So perhaps there is a political metaphor here after all.
(13) My friend had already climbed the same metaphorical mountain that I had just reached the summit of, and when she had reached the top she sat down and wept, much to the surprise of all her British friends.
(14) The results are discussed in terms of hemispheric memory for art works, metaphors, and the relationship between the two in the brain.
(15) The Oedipus myth has been a central metaphor in the evolution of psychoanalytic theory, particularly the psychoanalytic theory of development.
(16) Second, it refers to a metaphor representing the subjective experience of these patients who are unable to find a permanent identity but feel themselves sitting on the fence between a variety of different identities in a borderline position.
(17) The Tories, ever wedded to metaphors about killing foreigners, have called this the "Dambuster" moment.
(18) As critics of Mr Berlusconi have been barred from the state broadcaster Radiotelevisione Italia, Mr Fo protests that artists are being "defenestrated" metaphorically from the RAI for the same reasons that leftwing dissidents were literally thrown out of police station windows in the 1970s when Mr Fo wrote his work Accidental Death of an Anarchist.
(19) But that's not a metaphor: the universality of computation follows from the known laws of physics.
(20) Verbal processes later gain access to this graded perceptual knowledge, thus permitting the interpretation of synesthetic metaphors according to the rules of cross-modal perception.