Communicators have two possible motives for referring to a distasteful topic euphemistically: to minimize threat to the addressee's face and to minimize threat to their own. The experiment reported here investigated the influence of these interrelated but distinct face motives on euphemism use. Participants described a series of photographs, one of which depicted a distasteful stimulus (e.g., dog urine), in electronic messages they sent to a fictitious remotely located recipient. Some participants were led to believe they would meet the recipient at the experiment's conclusion, whereas others believed they would not meet and therefore remain anonymous to the recipient. Euphemisms were used to describe the distasteful stimuli more frequently among participants who believed their identities would be disclosed to the recipient. These results suggest that communicators are inclined to use euphemisms more for self-presentational purposes than out of concern for their addressees' sensibilities.In polite conversation, we might excuse ourselves to use the restroom even though we have no intention of resting there, remark that two friends are sleeping together when they have never jointly dozed, or credit a bun in the oven to a colleague with neither the time nor inclination to do any baking. We employ such euphemisms when we are reluctant to utter more semantically transparent terms (urinate, sex, pregnancy) for certain unsettling topics. However, given that we feel the need to raise unsettling topics on occasion, what do we gain from using euphemisms to describe them? Lexicographers have traditionally characterized euphemism as a linguistic substitution strategy (e.g., substitution of use the restroom for urinate) motivated by a communicator's reluctance to offend an addressee
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