[Ads-l] years young

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Thu Sep 3 23:53:18 UTC 2020


> On Sep 3, 2020, at 5:28 PM, Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> The Oliver Wendell Holmes example was also cited by the dearly departed
> Geoff Nunberg in a 2004 New York Times piece:
> 
> https://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/weekinreview/do-not-go-gently-geezers-gerries-and-golden-agers.html
> 
> In that same piece, Geoff foresaw that "boomer" would eventually become
> pejorative, 15 years ago before the "ok boomer" phenomenon.
> 
> —B

Great piece by Geoff.  I love his “floor wax” metaphor for what Pinker (1994) called the euphemism treadmill, referring to the fact that euphemisms become infected by their referents and must be replaced by new ones:

Banks have abandoned ''senior accounts'' for ''Classic checking,'' or ''Renaissance checking,'' and airline programs for older fliers go by names like ''Young at Heart'' and ''Silver Wings Travel Club.'' Euphemism is like waxing a floor -- you have to keep reapplying new coats as the old ones yellow.

I think the insight goes back at least to Cicero, who wrote as follows in his attack on euphemism in one of his “letters to friends”:

If what is indicated by the word is not indecent [turpe], the word indicating it cannot be indecent. When you [Papirius Paetus] speak of the anus, you call it by a name [anus, lit. = 'ring'] that is not its own; why not rather call it by its own [culus]? If it is indecent, do not use even the substituted name; if not, you had better call it by its own. The ancients used to call a tail penis, and hence from its resemblance to a tail, the word penicillus. But nowadays, penis is among the obscenities [in obscenis]. “Yes, but the famous Piso Frugi complains in his Annals that youths are given up to the penis [adulescentes peni deditos esse].” What you in your letter call by its own name [= mentula] he with more reserve calls penis; but because so many people use it so, it has become as obscene as the word you used.     
--Cicero, Epistulae ad Familiares [Letters to his Friends] IX.xxii, 45 BCE,  emphasis added; Loeb library edition, trans. W. Glynn Williams, 1928

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