"Euphemistically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of words being used euphemistically is that they often cease to have their milder original meaning, and cease therefore to seem euphemistic at all. Vile, which now means everything that is bad, is in its literal and earlier use merely "cheap." Base, which has the meaning of unutterable meanness, is literally merely "low." ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... met her when she was eighteen. The attraction had been sudden, violent and mutual; and she was quite prepared to marry him against all opposition. There had been a good deal in her own family, because Nigel was what is euphemistically called without means, and she was the daughter of a fashionable London vicar who, though distinguished for his eloquence and extremely popular, successful and social, had a comparatively small income and a positively large family. In a short time Nigel—not Bertha—succumbed ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... Octavia Hill, undertook to help him in 1864 in efforts to reclaim part—though a very small part—of the lower-class dwellings of London. Half a dozen houses in Marylebone left by Ruskin's father, to which he added three more in Paradise Place, as it was euphemistically named, were the subjects of their experiment. They were ridiculed at first; but by the noblest endeavour they succeeded, and set an example which has been followed in many of our towns with great ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... marriage that Sir Robert Howard became acquainted and intimate with Lady Purbeck; and, to make a long story short, let it be observed here that, in relation to the boy who was christened Robert Wright, Lady Purbeck had had what, among the lower classes, is euphemistically termed "a misfortune." ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... traces of their primitive customs, if indeed they have not, like the tribes formerly resident at Adelaide and other centres of population, been absolutely exterminated by contact with the white man with his vices and his civilisation, or by the less gentle method euphemistically termed "dispersion," which, if other nations were the offenders, we should ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... and bulwarks against the intrusion of that unearthly and evil power, of whose vicinity this solitary family were constantly reminded by the outline of Lisnavoura, that lonely hillhaunt of the "Good people," as the fairies are called euphemistically, whose strangely dome-like summit rose not half a mile away, looking like an outwork of the long line of ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... been, that autumn, a good deal of what was euphemistically described as "trouble" in that district of the County Cork which Mr. Denny and the Kilcronan hounds graced with their society, and when Mr. O'Grady and his field assembled at the Curragh-coolaghy cross-roads, it was darkly hinted ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... suddenness in his turns of expression, as where he speaks of "the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces." If he did not originate, he at any rate employed very effectively that now familiar device of the newspaper "funny man," of putting a painful situation euphemistically, as when he says of a man who was hanged, that he "received injuries which terminated in his death." He uses to the full extent the American humorist's favorite resources of exaggeration and irreverence. An instance of the ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers |
