Day 37 - In Other Words

Euphemisms, we use them everyday. Just today I was reading the Reader's Digest, and the editor started her column with the following, "I lost my father this year...", and I know she meant that her father had died this past year, however, when anybody chooses this euphemism, all I can picture in my mind is that there is an old man wandering aimlessly somewhere, and is lost. Why didn't she simply write, My father died this past year? I guess it has too much of a finality to it, easier to say lost.
In general, I think Americans choose to use a lot of euphemisms. If a man is short of stature, we can say that he is vertically challenged, and if he happens to be balding we may describe him as follically impaired. People no longer get fired, they have been let go, or downsized. And if you are fat in America you would most likely be known as being big-boned, pleasantly plump, husky, plus-sized or heavy, no one wants to say fat. And no one calls a drunk a drunk. They can be soused, three sheets to the wind, tipsy, polluted, hammered, plastered or under the weather but never just simply drunk.
English is an ever evolving language, and as we continue to strive to be politically correct, I am sure the list of euphemisms will continue to grow. Who can forget Roger Clemens being brought before Congress and when blatantly caught in a lie when he denied his steroid use, did he admit to the lie, nope, he just invented another word for lying, he mis-remembered. No one lies, we fib, we put a slant on things, or we might embellish the truth, but lie? Never.
I admire all non-English speaking people who attempt to learn and understand the language. Just when they think they get it, they run into the euphemism. Picture a group of folks whose 1st language is not English, and what do you think they would envision if told the Powder Room is just down the hall and to the left?
When I was a kid growing up in Boston, all the bathrooms were in the basement of the Margaret Fuller Elementary School, and when you needed to go, you eagerly asked to go to the basement, which as a small child I interpreted as what you called a bathroom when you are in school. Once we moved away from Boston, and I asked a teacher if I could go to the basement, she gave me the oddest of looks, that's when I learned another name for the bathroom - the rest room. Years later I learned it is also called the john, the loo, the toity, the head, the boy's room or the girl's room. I don't know about anyone else, but I think it would have been much easier for me if we just called the bathroom a bathroom.