By David Murdock Special to The Gadsen Times Friday, July 22, 2011 I love quotations in general. I collect musings of the great minds like some people collect stamps. My notebooks are full of scrawled quotations and attributions. The short, pithy encapsulation of a truth impresses me greatly. After all, William Shakespeare said, “Brevity is …
Euphemisms: The Politics of Language
Reviewed: Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms, by Ralph Keyes. New York. Little, Brown and Company, 2010. As Ralph Keyes notes in his book Euphemania, “Euphemisms can have a bright side and a dark side.” They can be a source of evasion, a way to avoid topics that should be confronted, a way of choosing …
Toward Freedom
Euphemisms: The Politics of Language June 16, 2011 Reviewed: Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms, by Ralph Keyes. New York. Little, Brown and Company, 2010. As Ralph Keyes notes in his book Euphemania, “Euphemisms can have a bright side and a dark side.” They can be a source of evasion, a way to avoid topics …
Weeklyseven.com
Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms June 16th, 2011 Ralph Keyes’ Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms (Little, Brown and Co., 2010) will delight anyone who loves words, their origins and the way that they reflect cultural intentions, subterfuges and biases. Keyes defines euphemisms as words or phrases substituted for ones that make us uneasy: …
Star Tribune
EUPHEMANIA By Ralph Keyes (Little, Brown and Co., 279 pages, $24.99) Ever ponder what makes a nacho chip “authentic” or “restaurant-style”? Or why it’s a “courtesy call” when the credit-card company tries to push something over the phone? Ralph Keyes explores such obfuscation when it comes to food, drunkenness, medicine, the military, money, sex, death …
Christian Science Monitor
Euphemistically speaking / The impulse to find more refined ways to talking about unpleasant truths is a constant of the human experience; what changes over time are the topics deemed to need sugarcoating. By Ruth Walker / April 19, 2011 When two different colleagues suggest I should pay attention to a book, I tend to …