It hurt, and that is not a euphemism. It hurt like a beating.

‘Spoilt’ is a euphemism for ‘loved.’

Nature is an outcry, unpolished truth; the art—a euphemism—tamed wilderness.

When we shrink from the sight of something, when we shroud it in euphemism, that is usually a sign of inner conflict, of unsettled hearts, a sign that something has gone wrong in our moral...

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical...

It’s amazing–my parents call everything a discussion. If I were standing across the street, firing a bazooka at my mother, while my father was launching mortar back at me, and Jeffery was charging down the...

As he once wrote of Kipling, his own enduring influence can be measured by a number of terms and phrases—doublethink, thought police, ‘Some animals are more equal than others’—that he embedded in our language and...

Progressives’ don’t just redefine (and valorize) deviancy; they insist on renaming it, too.

Edward had a personal horror of violence and never endorsed or excused it, though in a documentary he made about the conflict he said that actions like the bombing of pilgrims at Tel Aviv airport...

Users of clichés frequently have more sinister intentions beyond laziness and conventional thinking. Relabelling events often entails subtle changes of meaning. War produces many euphemisms, downplaying or giving verbal respectability to savagery and slaughter.

How is it possible to have a civil war?

He who was given the freedom to ask whatever should give the freedom to be answered however.

Don’t ever call me mad, Mycroft. I’m not mad. I’m just … well, differently moraled, that’s all.

Well, I’m not sure the New York Times was consciously trying to trivialise me, but the effect of it is to put everything in the same category as the gossip you read in the magazines...

You are a manipulator.I like to think of myself more as an outcome engineer.

When my mother passed away several years ago—well, wait a minute. Actually, she didn’t ‘pass away.’ She died. Something about that verb, ‘to pass away’ always sounds to me as if someone just drifted through...

World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.

Perhaps we have been guilty of some terminological inexactitudes.

The only sea I saw Was the seesaw sea With you riding on it. Lie down, lie easy. Let me shipwreck in your thighs.