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: …
Euphemania
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 …
Figuring Out the Small Stuff
Book Review: Euphemania by Ralph Keyes It took me longer to finish this book than the others. Probably because it’s a nonfiction book that talks about euphemisms. Since it wasn’t a story with a plot, I didn’t read it as consistently. So, here is my first nonfiction read of the year…Euphemania: Our Love Affair with …
Collateral Bloggage
Back in January, I saw Ralph Keyes’s Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms come through on the Washington County Libraries New Materials RSS feed, and I just knew i had to read it. It met my very tough and extremely arbitrary criteria of “having to do with science, math, history, or language or practically anything …
Gintastic Reads
I’m a word nerd, but I don’t often read books about language. I’m not sure if this is because I get enough of grammar at work, or because as a hopeless smartypants I prefer to feel like I know it all already, or because I’m afraid that once I get started I won’t be able …