EUPHEMISMS

More on “torture,” the word and the practice: “Don’t torture
English to soft-pedal abuse” by Geoffrey Nunberg, in Newsday,
adapted from his piece on NPR’s “Fresh Air.” It quotes Secretary of State Colin Powell
saying on Fox News, “Torture is torture is torture.” Also “What’s in a Word?
Torture” by Adam Hochschild, in The New York Times.
Among other things, it goes into forms of torture such as “tormentum insomniae” which was
“widely used in the Middle Ages on suspected witches” and which is known to us as “sleep
management,” a 21st-century euphemism that sounds like
corporate pillowtalk. 

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