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25 July 2008: Euphemisms

Well summer is well and truly arrived in Chester and as you can imagine the weather has been fairly miserable. Today however the sun is shining and no one can quite believe it. I expect that many people will be hoping that it will continue to be nice this evening so that they can have a barbeque at last!

We are very busy as you can imagine and the nicest thing of all is that we have so many returning students. It is always nice to see familiar faces round the school again and people do really seem happy to be back in Chester.

I thought we might look at euphemisms this week. The dictionary definition for euphemism is this: "a word or expression we use when we want to talk about something unpleasant or something which we find embarrassing and we try not to mention the word itself".

Exercise 1
Let's see if you can guess the meaning of these!
to be economical with the truth   
armed intervention   
ethnic cleansing   
to put something/someone to sleep   
to pass away   
between jobs   
big boned   
Dear John letter   
fall off a back of a lorry   
to have one too many   
Exercise 2
Now see if you can put one of the above expressions into the correct gap in these sentences. Don't forget you may have to change the tense.
All politicians are accused of   .
A: How much did you pay for your flat screen telly? B: It was really cheap. I think it   .
A: Is your grandfather any better? B: Oh didn't you know? He    last Monday.
The USA is threatening    in Iran unless they agree to cease developing nuclear power.
She's a very nice girl, but really quite   .
John is    at the moment so I don't think he can afford to come on holiday with us.
Paul looks dreadful this morning. I think he may    in the pub last night.
I'm afraid that Dennis will have to be   . His kidneys aren't working and he seems to be in pain all of the time.
Instead of telling David face to face that she didn't want to continue the relationship she wrote him a   .
One of the many horrors of the recent Bosnian conflict was the policy of    which displaced a great many people.

Have a good week and enjoy yourself if you are on holiday.
Love from all at English in Chester


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