Most people are aware of the word ‘euphemism’.
It came into English (around 1656) to mean substituting a ‘nice’ word for a ‘bad’ word.
So, instead of saying ‘toilet’ people would say ‘bathroom.’; instead of saying ‘dead’ they’d say, ‘passed away’ and so on.
I remember when I was the host of the ABC national current affairs show ‘AM’ (quite a few years ago now!) on that program we coined the expression ‘tired and emotional’ to replace the nastier expression ‘drunk.’
We’d rung Bob Hawke in Geneva, where he was attending and international union convention, for his comments on some local political event.
It was very late at night in Geneva, and he had clearly been socialising with other delegates, was slurring his words leaving sentences unfinished, and becoming quite excited about certain issues.
We asked our executive producer (who, I think, was Brian Furlonger at the time) if we could run this pre-recorded interview—given the way Hawke sounded.
And he coined the expression which he put into the introduction: “we spoke a short while ago to a tired and emotional Bob Hawke in Geneva.”
Very inventive!
So that’s the story behind ‘euphemism.’
But did you know there was the opposite—namely ‘dysphemism’?
This means replacing a ‘nice word’ with a ‘bad word.’
So, calling a freedom fighter against a dictator a ‘terrorist’ is an example of ‘dysphemism’—replacing the nicer term ‘freedom fighter’ with the judgemental term ‘terrorist.’
Similarly calling demonstrators on the streets of American cities ‘insurrectionists’ is also a case of ‘dysphemism.’
And now there’s a third term ‘orthophemism.’
This has been coined by Keith Allan and Kate Burridge (both Australian academics) in their 2006 book Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language.
They intend ‘orthophemism’ to mean a ‘neutral term’—neither especially nice nor especially bad.
So, in the case of the ‘glass half full’ (euphemism) or the ‘glass half empty’ (dysphemism) you could employ the orthophemism ‘glass containing fifty percent of its capacity.’
However, (1) this one is not yet found in any of the major dictionaries, and (2) like all new coinages is likely to do nothing except puzzle readers.
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