The book is surprisingly weak on euphemisms for ‘fool’, ‘idiot’ and ‘moron’. These change over the years and have included ‘twerp’ (apparently named after T. W. Earp, a decadent Oxford undergraduate of 1911), ‘clot’ (as in ‘you clumsy clot!’), ‘twit’, ‘nit’ (enabling Prince Philip to commit one of his celebrated gaffes when he said to the woman supervisor of a knitting factory, ‘So you’re the big knit, then?’), ‘nana’ (short for ‘banana’?) and ‘charley’ (as in ‘you’re a proper charley’ —though the word has also been slang for a woman’s breast). In the early 1980s, ‘wally’ was the favoured euphemism for a fool. It never spread to America: I had a boss on the Los Angeles Times called Wally, who was satisfyingly teased when I gave him a book (printed in London) entitled How to Be a Wally, illustrating the antics of a buffoon.
There are a few grace-notes Rees could have added about the euphemisms he does print. The word ‘consumption’ for tuberculosis has a rider — galloping consumption: Rider Haggard. In giving ‘the curse’ as one of the many euphemisms for menstruation, Rees might have recalled the unfortunate lines of Tennyson — ‘ “The curse has come upon me!”/ Cried the Lady of Shalott.’ He records that there is ‘no agreed pc term for a hunchback’. I can’t help remembering that the very non-pc Joan Rivers called Dolly Parton a ‘hunchfront’.
Political correctness supplies some of the most recently coined euphemisms in the book. Apparently, ‘herstory’ was seriously used by feminists at one time; but surely most of these inventions were meant as jokes — ‘femhole’ for ‘manhole’; ‘we’ll bake some gingerbread persons’; ‘snow creature’ for snowman); and ‘it’s raining non-human animal companions’. On the LA Times I was once ordered to change ‘fisherman’ to ‘angler’. One rather sweet American euphemism is missing: ‘pacifier’ for a baby’s dummy. It is America’s tragedy that it has as its president a dummy rather than a pacifier.
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