Contamination and Camouflage in Euphemisms

Abstract

Communicators may representationally displace an unpleasant topic by avoiding direct reference to it (e.g., she died) in favor of a euphemism (she's no longer with us). How does a euphemism's displacement capacity change over its career in the vernacular? Linguists have assumed that this capacity deteriorates as euphemisms become conventional and thus “contaminated” by their association with negative referents. In contrast, communicative pragmatics theory suggests that conventionality may confer camouflage-like properties to euphemisms, enabling addressees to process them in a mindless fashion. We report two studies investigating these divergent theoretical accounts. Study 1 explored the relationship between perceptions of euphemisms’ familiarity and politeness. Study 2 examined the attributional consequences of conventional and unconventional euphemistic encodings of an ostensibly taboo topic. Our results contradict the associative contamination hypothesis and comport with the camouflage hypothesis.

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