Just bought an encyclopaedia of euphemisms in a charity shop: that’s a lot of reading for just 50p! I like ‘taking an early bath’ for being sent off in a football match (maybe for committing a ‘professional foul’). Not in the book - but one of my favourites - is to ‘pour yourself a hand shandy’: euphemistic and alliterative! For that to happen, you need to have some ‘lead in your pencil’. My favourite euphemism for female masturbation is ‘checking the oil’. “We must have lunch some time” means “goodbye” (not "au revoir"... but "goodbye"). Some euphemisms seem almost worse than what they replace: ‘friendly fire’, for example. The book has ‘military intelligence’, though isn’t that an oxymoron - like ‘Microsoft Works' - rather than a euphemism? Excuse me… off to see a man about a dog.
Licenced today: another stately home, Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire…
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