(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.
Short
Definition:
(superl.) Not long; having brief length or linear extension; as, a short distance; a short piece of timber; a short flight.
(superl.) Not extended in time; having very limited duration; not protracted; as, short breath.
(superl.) Limited in quantity; inadequate; insufficient; scanty; as, a short supply of provisions, or of water.
(superl.) Insufficiently provided; inadequately supplied; scantily furnished; lacking; not coming up to a resonable, or the ordinary, standard; -- usually with of; as, to be short of money.
(superl.) Deficient; defective; imperfect; not coming up, as to a measure or standard; as, an account which is short of the trith.
(superl.) Not distant in time; near at hand.
(superl.) Limited in intellectual power or grasp; not comprehensive; narrow; not tenacious, as memory.
(superl.) Less important, efficaceous, or powerful; not equal or equivalent; less (than); -- with of.
(superl.) Abrupt; brief; pointed; petulant; as, he gave a short answer to the question.
(superl.) Breaking or crumbling readily in the mouth; crisp; as, short pastry.
(superl.) Brittle.
(superl.) Engaging or engaged to deliver what is not possessed; as, short contracts; to be short of stock. See The shorts, under Short, n., and To sell short, under Short, adv.
(adv.) Not prolonged, or relatively less prolonged, in utterance; -- opposed to long, and applied to vowels or to syllables. In English, the long and short of the same letter are not, in most cases, the long and short of the same sound; thus, the i in ill is the short sound, not of i in isle, but of ee in eel, and the e in pet is the short sound of a in pate, etc. See Quantity, and Guide to Pronunciation, //22, 30.
(n.) A summary account.
(n.) The part of milled grain sifted out which is next finer than the bran.
(n.) Short, inferior hemp.
(n.) Breeches; shortclothes.
(n.) A short sound, syllable, or vowel.
(adv.) In a short manner; briefly; limitedly; abruptly; quickly; as, to stop short in one's course; to turn short.
(v. t.) To shorten.
(v. i.) To fail; to decrease.
Example Sentences:
(1) Low birth weight, short stature, and mental retardation were common features in the four known patients with r(8).
(2) Both the vitellogenesis and the GtH cell activity are restored in the fish exposed to short photoperiod if it is followed by a long photoperiod.
(3) Comparison of wild type and the mutant parD promoter sequences indicated that three short repeats are likely involved in the negative regulation of this promoter.
(4) administration of the potent short-acting opioid, fentanyl, elicited inhibition of rhythmic spontaneous reflex increases in vesical pressure (VP) evoked by urinary bladder distension.
(5) Sixteen patients in whom schizophrenia was initially diagnosed and who were treated with fluphenazine enanthate or decanoate developed severe depression for a short period after the injection.
(6) But becoming that person in a traditional society can be nothing short of social suicide.
(7) Effects of habitual variations in napping on psychomotor performance, short-term memory and subjective states were investigated.
(8) A significant correlation was found between the amplitude ratio of the R2 and the sensitivity ratio of the rapid off-response at short and long wavelengths.
(9) Michael Caine was his understudy for the 1959 play The Long and the Short and the Tall at the Royal Court Theatre.
(10) Despite a 10-year deadline to have the same number of ethnic minority officers in the ranks as in the populations they serve, the target was missed and police are thousands of officers short.
(11) Optimum rates of acetylene reduction in short-term assays occurred at 20% O2 (0.2 atm (1 atm = 101.325 kPa] in the gas phase.
(12) Because of the short detachment interval, and the absence of underlying pathology or trauma, the recovery process described here probably represents an example of optimum recovery after retinal reattachment.
(13) Several interpretations of the results are examined including the possibility that the effects of Valium use were short-lived rather than long-term and that Valium may have been taken in anticipation of anxiety rather than after its occurrence.
(14) Short incubations with heparin (5 min) caused a release of the enzyme into the media, while longer incubations caused a 2-8-fold increase in net lipoprotein lipase secretion which was maximal after 2-16 h depending on cell type, and persisted for 24 h. The effect of heparin was dose-dependent and specific (it was not duplicated by other glycosaminoglycans).
(15) The following conclusions emerge: (i) when the 3' or the 3' penultimate base of the oligonucleotide mismatched an allele, no amplification product could be detected; (ii) when the mismatches were 3 and 4 bases from the 3' end of the primer, differential amplification was still observed, but only at certain concentrations of magnesium chloride; (iii) the mismatched allele can be detected in the presence of a 40-fold excess of the matched allele; (iv) primers as short as 13 nucleotides were effective; and (v) the specificity of the amplification could be overwhelmed by greatly increasing the concentration of target DNA.
(16) Much of the current information concerning this issue is from short-term studies.
(17) Mieko Nagaoka took just under an hour and 16 minutes to finish the race as the sole competitor in the 100 to 104-year-old category at a short course pool in Ehime, western Japan , on Saturday.
(18) Although temazepam was effective for maintaining sleep with short-term use, there was rapid development of tolerance for this effect with intermediate-term use.
(19) Thus there may be four types of LPS in PACI: one contains unsubstituted core polysaccharide and yields L2 on acid hydrolysis, another has short antigenic side-chains of the SR type and yields the LI fraction, while the two high molecular weight fractions are derived from core polysaccharides with different side-chains.
(20) Propofol is ideal for short periods of care on the ICU, and during weaning when longer acting agents are being eliminated.