Euphemisms in English Everyday Discourse Eufemismy V anglickém jazykovém prostředí

1.2.4 Military Euphemisms
Another area which abounds in euphemisms is a military realm and killing. 
However, these substitution words are not used in order to evade being offensive or to 
hurt someone’s feeling. Basically using these types of euphemisms is a certain play with 
listeners or readers in which the main aim is to cover or even lie about some facts, 
numbers or events. This highly figurative and innovative language is mainly used by 
politicians and media and thus this area is extremely favourable to the development of 
euphemisms.
Therefore, we call our enemies as 
aggressors, invaders, insurgents
or 
soft skin 
targets
. 
Collateral damages
refer to the dead civilians killed by our troops and we do 
not retreat but 
undergo a tactical withdrawal
. They have concentration camps, whereas 
we send people into 
pacification centres
and our bombing is just 
a protective reaction
. 
Legal killing is called 
execution, which
once used to be euphemism as well as to 
terminate 
or 
silence someone
; nowadays we label it as 
a capital punishment
. Also 
weapons got their euphemistic synonyms such as 
the gadget, the device, the thing
. 
Some of them were given names of household items – 
sewing machine
or 
coffee mill
. 

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22 
1.2.5 Food Taboo 
Food and drink is an inseparable part of our life. We eat not only to gratify our 
biological needs, but also for pleasure. It has its strong social value, it symbolizes 
hospitality and marks significant occasions such as Christmas Eve or Birthday.
Through the food and drink we locate ourselves into a particular social class. It means 
that meal might serve as an indicator of one’s lifestyle and living standard. Naturally, 
food and drink is tightly connected with our ethnicity and it is our culture and society 
who dictate food taboos. For example the western countries are disgusted by the idea of 
consuming dogs as well as Indians by our tradition of eating cows.
Euphemistic synonyms function as distractors from what we are actually eating 
and they mainly name meat as it is the most tabularised area of food. In fact, we eat 
beef
, 
veal, pork, mutton
and 
venison
rather than cows, calves, pigs, sheep or deer. The 
problem of renaming arises in the case of organs of animals. Organ meats, inside meats, 
offal and appendages do not make one’s mouth water. The term 
variety meats
was 
introduced, but it did not catch on with the public. Since French in this case sounds 
nobly English speakers refer to inner organs as 
rognons
. In terms of cooking the way of 
describing a recipe written in a cookbook has changed as well. We no longer kill, gut, 
pluck, clean and bone hack or mine, but we 
slice, cut, dice
or 
peel
.