Anyone visiting Myopic Books for the first time shouldn’t be looking for anything in particular. The best way to find things at the store, 1468 N. Milwaukee Ave., is to wander aimlessly through its rickety maze of narrow aisles, staircases and balconies, spread out over three floors.
Located in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighorhood, Myopic has such a large and comprehensive stock, it can afford to have a large and amusing reference section. Along with several cheap, old dictionaries, I found “The Book of Euphemism,” by Judith S. Neaman and Carole G. Silver.
As funny as this book is, it’s a legitimate reference work, cataloging hundreds of English-language euphemisms of American, British and Australian usage and providing thorough accounts of their origins. The book even includes the appearances of select euphemisms in popular literature. The entries are divided up into categories including sex, death, crime, the seven deadly sins, politics, and, of course, all manner of excretions and bodily fluids. What’s really great is the sheer number of euphemisms that have sprung up over time for all things unpleasant or forbidden.
Neaman and Silver’s catalog also introduces readers to expressions that just don’t make any sense. There’s “Discussing Uganda,” a British euphemism for “having sex”; “Ireland,” a 16th-century English substitute for the genitals and anus; “Golden doughnut,” an Australian name for the vulva; and so on. A “Nixon” is a low-quality narcotic, and someone with “Kangaroos in his/her top paddock” is insane.
Even this collection of evasive phrases is, according to the authors, only a small sample of the circuitous ways people have invented of talking about the crude and offensive things in life. In their introduction, Neaman and Silver say they’ve had to omit thousands of euphemisms, and even entire topics.
They write that euphemisms originally were invented for religious purposes; since saying the name of a deity once was thought to invoke that deity’s power, priests had to provide commoners with more indirect ways of referring to God. Over time this same idea also was transferred to “mysterious” topics like death and childbirth.
The authors say Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales,” especially “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” was a landmark in the development of sexual euphemisms, and that Shakespeare furthered the use of sexual innuendo and euphemism in his plays. Whether you’re a “three-letter man” committing the “nameless crime” or a “poundcake” participating in some “night baseball,” this book provides a wealth of polite ways to describe your adventures.
— Scott Gordon
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Figurative ‘golden doughnuts’ and ‘kangaroos’ at Myopic
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‘The Book of Euphemism’
