Since a recent drive-by scolding about someone else’s language-use (isn’t life on the Internet great) I’ve been thinking a bit about the psychology of euphemism — the question of what drives the prig, or whence the urge comes to sanitize language. (This has recently seemed, perhaps weirdly, like a pivotal and underdiscussed question of political psychology to me; perhaps this in itself says something unpretty about the state of American politics.) Of course a lot of the impetus behind euphemism is most likely the dynamic Freud described as “magical thinking” — that familiar form of sympathetic magic that unconsciously conceives words as effigies for the things they refer to, leading to the belief that sanitizing language will sanitize the reality the language describes. But the details can be unrulier than this suggests; the drive to sanitize obeys an associative logic that often doesn’t match up all that well with the linguistic workings of the words involved.

There’s an easily observable, ongoing process where certain euphemisms become pejoratives over time (a lot of people on the Internet seem, understandably, to think this is called “pejoration,” but I don’t think that’s quite right — pejoration entails a genuine semantic shift, rather than a purely connotational one), and this then necessitates the replacement of the former euphemism with a new, re-sanitized, term. Steven Pinker apparently has a nice phrase for this, calling it the “euphemism treadmill.” This gives a nice sense of the likely futility of the effort, but of course it’s also possible to believe a rearguard battle is worthwhile.

[Because this is the Internet, and people like to get mad more than they like to read, I’m putting a disclaimer up front here: what follows is not a “defense” of, or a case for, the use of any particular bad word that you may happen to disapprove of. Indeed I myself don’t use the words in this category that people usually get mad about. The only argument I’m advancing here is “prigs often don’t think carefully about the language-use that bothers them,” which is also the reason for this disclaimer.]

The “treadmill” effect is all particularly well-known in the case of a bunch of words for, let’s say, cognitive shortcomings — “moronic,” “idiotic,” “retarded,” etc. — some which have taken a tortuous path over the last century or two from more or less neutrally clinical language to familiar, everyday, tip-of-the-tongue derision, and then past that either into taboo, or into semantic breadth — the kind of genericizing or broadening of meaning that’s essentially the only reason why fewer people now take umbrage at “moron” than at “retard,” the former having worn down its sharp edges over a few more decades. And meanwhile there are always new replacements: the contemporary euphemist’s approach is to throw more syllables at the problem, so now we have these bulky phrases like “cognitively disabled,” which, by design, don’t trip off the tongue well enough to begin any trip into everyday language, much less to serve as mellifluous, enjoyable slurs.

An odd thing here is, though, that the euphemists don’t seem to believe that cognitive disability, mental incapacity, etc. don’t exist, only that it’s rude to make reference to them, or to involve them in metaphors or analogies. Many other kinds of insult are nonliteral, indeed barely denotative at all — we don’t usually intend, in the heat of the moment, to make a point about our interlocutors’ actual sexual relationships with their mothers — but this isn’t the case for any of the family of insults about stupidity. They’re meant to convey a specific, clearly understood meaning. And however uncomfortable it may be to admit, the imputation of even the more unpalatable or semi-taboo of these words is entirely sound: provided one is willing to grant that there are named categories of people who are bad at thinking, the implicit claim “you are as bad at thinking as a [category of people commonly considered bad at thinking]” makes a very obvious kind of sense. This obviously works very differently even from, say, racial/ethnic or gendered (etc.) slurs, which simply combine a purely derogatory sense with a category of people, but don’t draw any such implicit analogy, and whose application is limited to the group of people to whom the slur literally applies. (This is why calling a person who’s been diagnosed with idiocy an idiot, rather than an undiagnosed person whose stupidity you’re execrating, is a different story; that’s a straightforward pejorative, and hence it’s far more uncontroversially a dick move.) So the best case the euphemists are left with seems to be, granting all this, that it still causes unpleasant social side effects, unpleasant persistent conceptual associations, if we too commonly or habitually make metaphoric use of certain realities. And this may well be true — indeed I’m more or less persuaded of it myself — but it’s not the argument they usually seem to advance, in the heat of the moment.

If you concede the truth of “my Luve is like a red, red rose,” but still don’t, for whatever other reason, wish for roses to be so commonly associated with beauty, then it’s an exceedingly odd opening gambit to denounce Burns as a flower-bigot.