Since I started to think of kids as ‘age impaired’ they seem easier to deal with.
Ha, “pre-owned cars”. If you notice, its typically only pretentious luxury cars that use this moniker, the same cars that insist on using a faux-British announcer.
I was honored when my daughter proclaimed to me that I was no longer her mother but her birth unit… so much so that I dubbed her my birth entity.
“Only when he no longer knows what he is doing, does the painter do good
things.” --Edgar Degas
LoL
Good God, man! This thingyou have created…it is an abomination of life! Plundering the graves of long-dead threads to fuel your own sick desire to play God! I will have nothing to do with it!
runs from the lab, screaming
Not too long ago there were Real Estate Men and Undertakers. Now we have Realtors and Morticians. I do like changes that make job titles gender neutral, such as police officer instead of policeman. I have know administrative assistants that get promoted to other types of jobs, but never a secretary that did so. In the bank where I used to work, no one had a secretary. The president of the bank typed up and printed and mailed his own letters. He did not have an a a or a secretary. However, many people in the bank did have administrative assistants. These people were not to be used simply to do clerical work, but to do research and other tasks that related to their supervisor’s job. These a a’s often did get promoted.
Sometimes euphamisms are used to avoid words that have become slurs or at least have negative associations. Some would say black is a euphamism for Negro. Disabled is a euphamism for crippled. I certainly prefer disabled to be used.
There are euphamisms that are just silly, handi-capable strikes me as one of these.
Personally, I prefer cacophemisms.
I didn’t work as an editorial assistant!
I was the office drudge.
Or the whipping intern.
Or the coffee boy.
(Entertainment unit?)
Realtor dates to around 1920.
Mortician goes all the way back to 1895.
While the impetus for PC language is similar to the impetus for euphemisms, in general, and they both look like job title inflation, they are different phenomena.
Euphemisms tend to be “natural.” People shy away from death, so their loved ones “pass away.”
Job title inflation tends to be either ego-stroking or vanity (depending on whether one is applying the new term to en employee or to oneself).
PC is an attempt to avoid offending other people. When it results in using “disabled” in place of “gimps” it probably has a purpose. (On the other hand, I would see that as simple politeness.) When it results in refering to a paraplegic as “differently abled” it is generally silly.
“Sales Associate” is not PC; it is an attempt to pretend that a sales clerk is more interested in a pretty title than in an actual livable salary.
One can smirk at both PC and job title inflation, but one should note that they have different motivations and desrve to be laughed at for different reasons.
I learned this weekend that corpses in a funeral home are referred to as “guests”. Hmmm.
I also refer to temps (including myself) as “disposable employees”. I have a lot of fun with PC-speak - maybe that’s why I’m a quiet person - self-preservation 
Please, don’t be so gauche. Used cars are now referred to as “Previously Cherished”. 
When I used to work in the oil patch, the company I worked for tried mightily to promote our personnel to clients as “Hydrocarbon Data Engineers”, but everyone on the rig just continued to call us “Mud Loggers” anyway.
That said, I find it much more pleasant to be “between jobs” than “unemployed”.
This must have come from the time when underwear was Unmentionable, as an A&E documentary on the subject was entitled. Presumably people were uncomfortable saying underwear as it connoted a tight or flimsy (i.e. boxers) intimate garment.
So they called them shorts…this one always makes me laugh because I get this mental image of people wearing normal street shorts under their jeans or trousers.
tomndebb wrote:
It’s also a registered trade mark.
Anybody can call himself a “real estate man,” but you can only call yourself a “Realtor” if you have one of those pretty certificates from the National Association of Realtors.
Maybe a little OT – then again, it’s the T’s fault for being so narrowly focused…
Remember the days before “faith-based institution” became a euphemism for “church”? It was, like, 1999 or so.
Honestly, isn’t “euphemism” just a euphemism for not saying what you really mean?
–Grump “three-ring circumlocution” y