When there’s a term that could be interpreted as troubling or offensive, we often employ a “euphemism” in its place. When you don’t want to come right out and say “Bonzo is the stupidest person I’ve ever met”, you can use a euphemism like “Bonzo is not the sharpest tool in the shed.”
Euphemisms are easy to find. But what about if your goal is to create some discord where there wasn’t any? This is used a lot in political speech, where you take something you want to stir up sentiment (not reason, mind you; this has to do with emotion) against something and rename it in a more offensive way. “End of life counseling” sounds ok, but “death panels” sounds worse. “Environmentalist” is pretty neutral, but “tree-hugger” can be divisive.
Just like we have “euphemism” for using a “good” word in place of a “bad” one, there’s a term for using a “bad” word in place of a “good” or neutral one: “dysphemism.”
Of the two terms, “euphemism” is older; its earliest citation in the OED is from 1656, in a sort of dictionary called the Glossographia: “Euphemism, a good or favorable interpretation of a bad word.” “Dysphemism” seems to have appeared later, in the late 1800s. Its first citation is from the April 1873 issue of Macmillan’s Magazine: “The great system which Comte, and other assailants, call by the euphemism, or dysphemism, of Catholicism.”
Besides political speech, of course, the vast predominance of euphemisms can be found in the world of marketing, where inventing a term like Symmetrical Four-Wheel Drive is believed to drum up more sales than simply explaining “power goes to all four wheels of the car.” There’s nothing new about this. In the late 1870s, when fur hats were quite popular, some people were happy to get a good price on one made from “Alaska Sable.” In other contexts, of course, the animal had a more common name: skunk.
