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In “Oxford English Dictionary”, the definition is much simpler – “An indirect word or phrase that people often use to refer to something embarrassing or unpleasant, sometimes to make it seem more acceptable than it really is”.
Casas Gomez (2009) provided a recent definition for euphemism as:
“The cognitive process of conceptualization of a forbidden reality, which, manifested in discourse through the use of linguistic mechanisms including lexical substitution, phonetic alteration, morphological modification, composition or inversion, syntagmatic grouping or combination, verbal or paralinguistic modulation or textual description, enables the speaker, in a certain ‘context’ or in a specific pragmatic situation, to attenuate a certain forbidden concept or reality.”
1.2.2 Literature Review of Euphemism at Abroad
Peter Newmark regarded euphemism as a means of metaphor and pointed out in Approaches to Translation that "Euphemisms are invariably metaphors and the images often have to be replaced by a cultural equivalent, unless the translator is trying to inform the reader rather than affect him in a way similar to the SL reader". (2001:89).
Euphemism is a communicative skill, “telling it like it isn’t.” In the present researches, euphemism is used as indirect or polite means of expressing taboos, of which the purpose is to save either the speaker's or the listener’s face. The concept of “face’’ plays a motivational role in the process of euphemizing.
In Journal The Linguistics of Euphemism, Ham’s A Diachronic Study of Euphemism Formation (2005), the main function of euphemism is to prevent the interlocutors from a possible offensive purpose against each other caused by launching a taboo topic or by mentioning a subject matter to which one of the interlocutors may feel uncomfortable.
Wardhaugh also suggests that speakers are supposed to protect their face as well as the face of others in An Introduction To Sociolinguistics “to give labels to unpleasant tasks and jobs in an attempt to make them sound almost attractive” (2010: 249).
In 2011 Bowers and Pleydell-Pearce state that ‘‘Euphemisms are effective because they replace the offensive word by another word that is similar conceptually.’’(2011:1)
Influenced by the Western studies on euphemism, in recent decades, plenty of Chinese scholars began to make systematic studies on English euphemism and achieved quit a lot.
Chen Wangdao was the first person who made a study on euphemism as a figure of speech. There are two types of euphemistic devices in Chinese: one is Wanzhuan; the other is avoidance of taboos. As in his book Introduction to Rhetoric published in 1976, he studied euphemism from the angle of rhetoric. And in his opinion, euphemism as a rhetoric device is not limited to the lexicon level, but also extended to sentence as well as discourse levels.
In 1995, Shu Dingfang published the article Euphemism Study: Retrospect and Prospect, in which he raised several issues that we should pay attention to in euphemism studies. One is to strengthen the multi-lingual comparative study on euphemisms. In his opinion, a comparative study on euphemism can not only reveal the universality and particularity of euphemism, but also has very practical significance, especially for foreign language teaching, translation and other disciplines in applied linguistics.
In the new century, the scope of study on euphemism is continuously being enlarged.
“When people feel unwilling to talk about some tabooed things, but they have to do so, they will choose well sounding words for replacement or use metaphors and indirect ways to address. All these substitutive and indicative words are called euphemisms.” Said in Bao Huian’s book Cultural Context and Language.(2001:178-179)