Lingual Evasion: Euphemisms and Their Effect on Perceptions in View of Neil Postman’s “Invisible Technologies”

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In his essay “Invisible Technologies,”, Neil Postman argues and exemplifies how language acts as an ideology in shaping the way people perceive and understand the world around them. One important form of linguistic manipulation which has an influence on human perceptions is euphemisms. Postman argues that “[language] instructs us not only in the names of things but, more important, in what things can be named” (Postman , 187), and this directly relates to the function euphemistic language holds in society. Euphemisms enable the same term to have different names, and thus different connotations, affecting people’s perceptions of the term and its meaning. By covering and masking terms that have negative connotations, euphemistic language alters the nuances associated with those terms and therefore also the related social views and attitudes . Thus euphemisms generally seem to surface from a cultural need to neutralize terms that have provocative or negative undertones. The simplest example of this is the use of “powder room” as opposed to “bathroom,”, or in the same context, “tinkl...

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