A Cultural Study On Euphemism In American Journalistic English

In daily communication, speakers are inclined to resort to euphemism so that they canmake the utterance sound less offensive to the listener than the word or phrase it replaces.Euphemism originated from respect for, fear of metaphysical powers, and now it is deeplyingrained in social life and strongly reflects social and cultural values. The choice betweensubstitutions depends entirely on the context.As a mass media, news report provides us with the information about what happens in theworld in every facet and impacts people’s lives deeply. It gets the feature of authentic, accurate,conciseness and promptness. What’s more, as a communicative device, it possesses otherfeatures such as publicity and propaganda, thus makes euphemism, with the traits of obscurityand indirectness, play an important and specific role in journalistic English.The primary function of euphemism in American news reports is to protect the writer andreader from possible effrontery and offence, and ultimately maintain the profits of politiciansand government. Specifically, this offence may appear in the broaching of taboo words; or bymentioning issues to which one party involved may be sensitive, such as politics or socialconcerns.The previous study of English euphemism merely remains in the language itself, andmost of them mainly focus on the perspectives such as rhetoric, pragmatic, social and cognitiveand so on. While the usage of euphemism in journalism English is almost a blank, which leavesa room for the author to make an exploratory study to the subject. Moreover, euphemism is notonly a linguistic concept, but also a cultural phenomenon. Therefore, we make a culturalanalysis of euphemism in American journalistic English through the combination of qualitativeand quantitative approaches and take the Sapir-Whorf Assumption as the dominant theoreticalframework. The data selected are online news reports mainly from typical and authorityAmerican newspapers, USA Today, New York Times and Washington Post. It includes three newstypes based on the content, political news, economic news and social life news with regard tovarious topics. The author will first observe euphemisms in news report according to theformation of euphemism, and then find out cultural factors as well as functions of euphemismsapplied in American journalistic English.Through mass reading and studying, the author finds that there are heaps of euphemisms in journalistic English, mainly political ones, especially in international political news about war.It shows the function of disguising facts, beautifying reality, being polite and humoring. Theeuphemism used in journalistic English implies American culture, such as American values ofindividualism, equality, competition, hardworking which derived from its history, as well aspolitical and religious culture and so on. The study poses great significance on theunderstanding of American journalistic English and intercultural communication, as well asEnglish teaching and learning. It is hoped that the research could provide some usefulinspiration for future studies on the euphemism and discourse genre of English news report.