SANSKARI BOND

“Euphemisms persist because lying is an indispensable part of making life tolerable.” 
― Bergen Evans

It was many years ago, we were playing cricket with a cork ball and bat when a boy, not very well known to us, went down, clutching his groin. It was a situation which  we really did not  know how to "handle" .  Actually, we were tongue- tied about  how to make polite enquirers about the poor boy's injured organ.  The Hindi slang words we knew and used amongst close friends ( one happened  to be the name of a University in Sweden and another the first name of the Self Control singer) we thought were way too offensive to mention, too unpleasant to suggest.

As he lay there, curved fetally like a sea horse, writhing in pain, a passer by who was watching the proceedings, came over, shook him and asked , ' Tumhara tam-tam thheek hai na?' This immediately lightened up the proceedings, the boy also got up and smiled,  and assured that "it" was indeed all right. I had never heard the word tam -tam or a  horse drawn carriage ( also the tanga as in Basanti's tanga in Sholay) used  to refer to male genital but in the situation, one easily understood what was being referred by it.

Well, tam-tam is what is called a euphemism, a kind of an innocuous word or expression, to mask obscenity or profanity , prurience, uncomfortable realities like disease and death though sometimes to amuse as well, and sometimes,  as R.W. Holder put it, as  "the language of evasion, hypocrisy, prudery and deceit." Derived from the Greek word euphemia or the use of words of good omen, it is opposite of blaspheme or evil speaking - the third monkey of Gandhi's triad. For those who like to see in shades of grey, euphemism ( sweet talk) is a mean between orthophemism ( straight talk) and dysphemism ( harsh talk) 

One of the first areas where euphemisms came to be used was in references to the profane. Goddam,  Jesus, and even Hell were worse than fuck and shit - a rectitude powered by religious and royal decrees - the prohibition imposed by the Cretan king Rhadamanthus against swearing by gods was a precursor of sorts to the later strong Puritan interdictions . Cock stood not so much for penis as much as a euphemism for God (kokk , gosh, and gogg) - so much so that Ophelia could pun in Hamlet :'Young men will do 't; By cock they are to blame.' 

But the area of the taboo which has been the largest centres around the sexual if one goes by the sheer size of euphemisms- there are 1,200 terms for 'vagina', 1,000 for 'penis', 800 for 'copulation', and around 2,000 for 'whore'.  Talk of sex and womanhood  , especially between the opposite sexes, was a big taboo.  The supremely inventive and ravenously insatiable Mrs Burnham of Amitav Ghosh's Flood of Fire told Zachary "a woman, may be bawdy with a woman, a man with men, but never the one with  the other". The act of fornication was also discussed, and  conducted, in a hush hush manner for " coupling is merely matter of dropping the chatty in the dawk; it is done with a quick hoisting of nightgowns , and that too when all the battis ( lights)have been  extinguished". Actually, such were the restrictions woven  around sex that sexual feelings were often communicated in the language of flowers, sometimes called floriography, through tussy- mussy( a small round bouquet) .

Being a direct outcome of sex, the word pregnancy was best avoided. In Victorian England , euphemisms like " to be expecting" or " to have a bun in the oven" were used. I doubt my mother would ever allow the word to come on her lips when she could easily say " good news". Contraception and abortion, for long declared illegal by law, spawned a large number of euphemisms to dodge the law as well- the best example being the popular female contraceptive from 1930s to 1960s Lysol disinfectant which was advertised as "feminine hygiene "product and Vatican Roulette which bore a definite stamp of the Church's only known approval of birth control, also called the rhythm method. 

Menstruation, too. "It was only when she found that her blood had begun to flow that  it occurred to Jean Lousie that she was a girl and after all these years of reckless, pummelling activity; fighting, football, climbing……she must now go to a world of femininity,"writes Harper Lee in her second novel.  If menstruation was taboo, then so was masturbation and Mrs. Burnham, who knew what " soaping the sepoy or jerquing the jamandar" meant and  had had spied upon  Zachary "polishing a pin",  never mentioned the word masturbation directly to him and instead sent him books on ill effects of Onanism which included such chapters as  Mr. Graham's Lecture to Young Men on Chastity.

Other forms of body expulsions have been covered by euphemisms as well-  to have the vapours, kill a duck , step on a frog have been used as references  for passing gas though the most used , and puzzling, is break wind , first used in 1603  - from the polysemic Anglo- Saxon verb brecan which also meant move. Why only body expulsions, even the first threat of body protrusion of the tam tam would be met with a swift Selling Hot dogs or Letting the Horsey out of the Barn. In Patna we simply said , " post box khula hua hai".

When my friend was informed by the doctor that she had Koch's disease  as he did not want to break her heart by uttering the dreaded word tuberculosis, her problem was not about  knowing what it meant, but  of telling others because of its embarrassingly penile pronunciation. Venereal diseases were generally couched in colourful and innovative euphemisms like Blue balls,  Rhea sisters, Pissing Razor Blades, Venus's curse, lobsters' tails,  The French Disease ,  French Gout, Pissing Pins and Needles. 

In a paper titled The Use of English Language as a Weapon and Shield in Human Resource , Management, Prof. Asma Rizwan of Peole's University, Bhopal talks about euphemisms  which have evolved as per the demands of the industry.When A&T fired 40,000 workers they were just carrying out a force management program aimed at reducing an "imbalance of forces and skills through reduction of force",  while P&G once made its intentions very clear by announcing that it anticipated 6000 enrolment reductions. Some obfuscate by rather perplexing terms like decruit, lateralize, waive. 

To scrub clean all traces of gender associations, secretary came to be called administrative assistant while titles were made to sound important, some called it "sentimental equalisation", so that garbage collectors became sanitation engineers and barbers came to be called stylists. Most firms resorted to title inflation and the banking sector had a fondness for Vice President is evident from titles like Executive Vice Presidents, Senior Vice Presidents, Associate Vice Presidents, Junior Vice Presidents, etc. 

But there is of course this sordid state of affairs where euphemisms emerge not as disguises for truth but rather the enemy of it. Over the years, bureaucracies have spawned doublespeak - sunshine units for contamination of radioactive isotopes, collateral damage, ethnic cleansing, enhanced interrogation, transfer of population or rectification of frontiers, pacification, etc. One of the seminal expositions of this has been George Orwell's Essay , 1946 :"Politics and English Language".

No less interesting has been tracing the zig zag path of the evolution of euphemisms as words have been formed, mutated, borrowed, combined, loaned, particularized, generalized and spun around. So if you wanted to come down on the Scoville scale, you conveniently mispronounced.  I would say "you basket" instead of "You bastard" to avoid a sock in the  eye from the school bully, or use the first letter What the Eff or suffix "word" like " the F word ". Of course, you could simply go the acronymic way by saying SNAFU or SOB. One could innovate with the slangs  - the reverse slang like epar for rape,  the rhyming slang like Bristol ( breasts)  which was shortened form for Bristol cities which rhymed with titties and even use a full throated slang like screwed up for fucked up.

You could combine two individually innocuous words hand and job for masturbation or  derive a more palatable word like fellatio from a foreign word like Latin fellare ( to suck) or add a  smiley to the harsher Saxonic words by borrowing from French so as to write affair(e) in place of sexual engagement or lingerie for underwear or from Latin so that instead of excrement one could say faeces. As an  expert wordsmith, you could use satisfaction and innocent in particular contexts for orgasm and virginal respectively or just imply contextually a word like loose which means unattached for sexually available.

A  whole world of metaphors like red ( for menstruation), globes, lemons and brown eyes for breasts would lighten up communication while following the 'general-for-specific' metonymic path , you could use "it" for sex  and "thing" for male sexual organ or even construct  onomatopoetically bonk [sexual intercourse] or piss ( urinate) .Ironically, blessed came in for damned and enviable disease for syphilis . Understatements  have softened the blow when used as sleep for die or not very bright for stupid. Of course, you could overstate with hyperbolic jumps so that fight to death hid a reference to death or call yourself Personal Assistant to the Secretary  ( Special Activities ) and yet cook daal and roti for your boss! 

Expert wordsmiths like Austen made  Kitty a euphemism for  a prostitute while D.H Lawrence left John Thomas and Lady Jane as words of genitalic reference . This did  not stop at proper nouns and many geographic adjectives sprouted up as euphemisms - Italian way for anal sex, French letters as condoms and Essex girl for sexually available woman. Interestingly, much as they evolve as substitutes for taboos, euphemisms devolve into  taboos ,  jogging on the "euphemism treadmill" -  an 18th century euphemism toilet which came in for House- of - Office came to be deemed as inappropriate by the 20th century and came to be replaced by washroom and restroom!

Why do we use euphemisms? There is an interesting Face-Work Theory, developed by Brown and Levinson, propped on the fundamental idea that people living in a society do their best to save face and not to lose it, both of themselves and the persons with whom they communicate. The fear of lawsuits or liticaphobia had impelled  HR offices to remove the word  firing so that  no one is fired but is actually laid off and funnily enough,  the man in charge of firing people in Citigroup is called Head of Productivity.

Political correctness has resulted in negroes being called Afro- Americans, German Shepherds as Alsatians during WW I while shell shock of WW I vintage became combat fatigue during WW II to be now called PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in sync with our " current effete sensibilities". Of course, there have been moments in history which probably set the euphemism manufacturing machines working overtime like the Victorian Age when in the company of women, reference to male animals such as buck and stallion was considered downright impolite, when words which had 'cock' in them were changed so that haycock became haystack and cockerel a rooster. 

It does not look as if prudery was a monopoly of those times . If it has its way, the CBFC could unleash a large number of euphemisms in Indian films- that most enduring and popular of the Made in India brands in the world. Even though the ban on 32 cuss words had to be revoked, the latest axe has fallen on  the iconic James Bond. In a swift climbdown, Bond who was once acknowledged as a "cunning linguist" when he reported about "brushing up on a little Danish", the Secret Service Agent now will have to   mouth  euphemisms like "idiot" instead of "asshole" and "bighead and cats" instead of "bastard and balls" for   Welcome to the Age of Sanskari Bond!