Ameliorated words of offensive origin

[Duane Campbell]

On Tue, 27 Feb 2001 16:54:54 -0500 Gregory {Greg} Downing <gd2 at NYU.EDU>
writes:
>
> Your examples all appeared to be sexual, but if your definition of
> "offensive" is a bit wider, I've recently glanced back through
> Trench's _On
> the Study of Words_ (1851), that classic of Victorian popular
> philology,

Oh, the Victorians, a veritable gold mine of words for the easily
offended. For example, you could not say ":leg", which was too, too
stimulating. "Limb" was less prurient.

D