Euphemisms: The endless evolution of words we use to avoid offence

During the 2008 US subprime crisis, I asked a banker acquaintance what it was all about. 'The banks handed out mortgages to all sorts of people who couldn't keep up with their payments, such as niggers and the like.' I shut my eyes to exorcise the N word that, conjured out of its censored captivity, loomed in the air like an evil genie.

'Please,' I said. 'Never, ever, use that word you just used. The correct term is 'African American', or just 'Black' if you prefer.' He raised his eyebrows in perplexity, as if to say, 'You mightn't call a spade a spade, but a digging implement, but it'll remain what it is.'

A rose is a rose is a rose, wrote Gertrude Stein, thereby through incantatory repetition evoking the image of the flower, unadorned by platitude. So, yes, a spade is a spade is a spade, or even a bloody shovel if you like. However, as societal mores change, words and terms that accrete associations deemed to be undesirable require a substitution of articulated apparel. Rather like the legs of pianos having to be covered in Victorian drawing rooms, as nether limbs, be they of animate beings or of inanimate objects, needed concealment from the public gaze.

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Euphemisms - from the Greek 'euphemismos', which means 'speaking with favourable words' - are like stockings for pianos and cloak words and phrases that might offend sensibilities by camouflaging them in a more consensually acceptable form.

Euphemisms are sometimes confused with 'euphuism', which refers to the ornate and flowery literary style used by the 16th c. writer John Lyly in his didactic novel, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, though both share the characteristic of circumlocution, of talking in circles, and often using multiple words when one might suffice.

Euphemisms are like fig leaves on nude statuary or paintings, or like underwear. We all know what's beneath them. But that doesn't mean we have to make an exhibit of it. And like fig leaves that wither, or underwear which requires regular changing, euphemisms must be replaced by other euphemisms from time to time. Mulk Raj Anand's 1935 novel Untouchable became Mohandas Gandhi's 'Harijan', which became Ambedkar's 'Dalit', which means 'ground down' and expresses an assertion of civil rights.

What in 1922 was called International Society for the Welfare of Cripples, by 1960 had become the International Society for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled. Subsequently, 'disabled' was semantically shelved in favour of 'handicapped', which was itself substituted with 'physically challenged', which morphed into 'differently abled'.

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We euphemise in daily usage. People don't 'die', they 'pass away' or 'pass on'. The facility employed for what is known as doing 'Number 1' and 'Number 2' is referred to as the bathroom, or washroom, or restroom, to disassociate it from its more privy uses.

In the corporate world, organisations don't sack people, or fire them, they 'downsize'. In the film industry, people hired for crowd scenes are no longer called 'extras', which conveys a sense of being unnecessary or superfluous, but are classified as 'atmospheric personnel', while collectors of refuse style themselves as 'sanitation engineers'.

In the cloak-and-dagger realm of espionage, CIA notoriously coined the phrase 'terminate with extreme prejudice' as a stand-in for the act of assassination, and 'enhanced interrogation techniques' for torture, thereby applying thumbscrews to language itself.

Euphemisms go hand in hand, or in glove, with what used to be called 'political correctness', which, when it began to acquire a miasma of mothballs, was euphemised to 'woke'. Will woke give a woke-up call to euphemism and devise a new, euphemised term for it? Yuckism, to denote something yucky being covered up? Asteriskism for unprintable words in which asterisks replace letters? Or just plain blankety-blankism, which leaves a blank space on the page or on the listener's sensitivities, which have been suitably anaesthetised?