Technical Euphemism

Guinan: What are you going to do? Go back to your room and pout?
Ro Laren: I am not twelve years old! If I want to go to my quarters and contemplate my situation, that does not mean that I am... pouting!

— Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Rascals"

Most euphemisms sound less accurate than the thing they're a euphemism for (for example "buying the farm" for death). These euphemisms, however, are overly accurate, to the point that the speaker sounds like a walking encyclopaedia.

Uses of Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, Spock Speak, or Gratuitous Latin (or dog Latin) to cover up a disturbing, embarrassing, or gross term (like saying, "emesis" instead of "throwing up") is what a Technical Euphemism is.

People may use them because technical words sound clinical and thus are less likely to come off as uncivilised or disturbing. They may also be used as a Less Embarrassing Term for something the speaker finds childish (e.g. "It's not tears, it's lacrimal fluid!") because a person is less likely to be thought of as childish if they're using "grown-up" words. Sometimes, such as in cases of Friendship Denial, it might also be an attempt to avoid sounding emotionally-charged. If someone repeats what the speaker said in Layman's Terms, that's a Euphemism Buster.

A Sub-Trope of Unusual Euphemism and Distinction Without a Difference. May overlap with "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word, Bowdlerise, Deadly Euphemism, Exact Words, Expospeak Gag, Go to the Euphemism, IKEA Erotica, Insistent Terminology, Political Overcorrectness, Sexual Euphemism, and Sophisticated as Hell. Compare Pretentious Pronunciation. Contrast Scary Science Words, for when technical words make something sound more disturbing.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Akane-banashi, Nerimaya tells a Setting Update variant of the rakugo story "Tenshiki", which is about people trying to use a word they don't know means "flatulence". The lord and vassal are replaced with a researcher and his assistant discussing livestock management, the former whom was asked how they'll handle the issue of "BM". While he pretends he knows what it means, he's shocked at the end to figure out it refers to bowel movements.

Comic Books

• Adventure Time: In Issue 5, Adventure Tim calls the Mice King "evil". The Mice King objects to this and claims that he's just "chaotic neutral". Tim proceeds to show him a poster of all characters' morality alignments and the Mice King is designated under "neutral evil".
• Box Office Poison: When Sherman has to use the bathroom, he informs James that he wants to "use the euphemism".

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes: Calvin sometimes uses overly-sophisticated vocabulary to get away with insulting Moe. Being the Dumb Muscle, it usually flies over his head. An example of which is when Calvin tells him that his "simian countenance suggests a heritage rich in species diversity" to imply that he looks like an ape.
• Luann: When Luann questions Bernice about why she's claiming she just wants to be friends with her past Love Interest Piro yet is ignoring him completely (not even responding to a letter he asked Luann to deliver, inviting her for coffee), Bernice says "I'm not ignoring. I'm responding with constructive selectivity."

Fan Works

• In Creamed Cherries, Bambi is too shy to describe his date with Faline as such, and insists on calling it a "bonding exercise".
• In The Emperor (based on Doctor Who), the Doctor needs to pee and claims he needs to take care of "a private matter of a biological nature".
• Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past: After Healer Stanhope uses medical jargon to tell Harry about the details of cutting dead tissue out of his arm, Harry replies that he knows what all those words mean, which the Healer replies is a pity.
  Stanhope: I usually skate by using technical terms when people want to know what happened. Most of them don't really, not in any detail. They just feel like they should ask.
• Hermione Granger and the Swiss Tournament: Samantha Carter is an astrophysicist, and is also in charge of essentially babysitting Terawatt during a mission in the deep ocean, to ensure Terawatt doesn't push herself too hard and develop hypothermia. That means plenty of breaks for meals and naps — or rather, "mandatory thermal recalibration periods".
• In In the Dark, a The Loud House fanfic, while the Louds are in the hospital's waiting room, Lisa informs Lori that she has to "egestionate"^note The correct term would be "egest". Lori is confused until Lisa sheepishly admits that she just has to use the bathroom.
• In the Laverne & Shirley fanfic KSM - Kiss Me, the narration pauses awkwardly with an ellipsis when about to say what Laverne's sinuses are blocked by, then calls it an "unpleasant greenish bodily fluid".
• In Princess Celestia Is In Your Bed, Steve calls Celestia's farts "biological warfare".
• Princesses Don't Potty: Zigzagged when Princess Celestia has a Potty Emergency thanks to the Mane Six spiking her drink with a diuretic; the narration comments that it's quite urgent and requires "sophisticated vocabulary", but also notes that what she's going through isn't even that fancy, so "She didn't have to urinate or micturate either. She had to pee."
• In Scooby Kratt, a crossover fanfic of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! and Wild Kratts, Velma insists her disease is not a cold, but a "viral disease of the upper respiratory tract which affects primarily the nose".
• In Under the Weather, a fanfic of Ghostbusters (1984), when Egon's friends accuse him of "throwing a tantrum", he says that he doesn't throw tantrums, he "makes disagreements".
• In the The Loud House fic Wet Genius, Lisa sheepishly admits to Leni that she wet the bed due to having had a nightmare about being chased by the Boogeyman, only she says she "urinated in [her] sleep". She also calls crying "letting out some of [her] inner turmoil to empty [her] mind of distracting thoughts".

Films — Animation

• 101 Dalmatians: Subverted in a Show Within a Show that Horace and Jasper are watching. A woman is trying to find a euphemism for murder and starts to say, "Do something of a violent nature", but then settles on the more casual euphemism "do someone in".
• Atlantis: The Lost Empire: Milo accuses Rourke's crew of being mercenaries. Rourke says he'd rather call them "adventure capitalists".
• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: When Flint is on the phone with Sam, he tries to ask her out, but in the middle of calling it a "date", he chickens out and swaps it for the word "activity".
• Halloween Is Grinch Night: Euchariah, the trope namer for Go to the Euphemism, calls the outhouse "the euphemism" and says he needs to go there.
• ParaNorman: Neil insists that he does not have boobs and that they're called "pectorals". Alvin punches him there and Neil groans, "Ow, my boobs!"
• Toy Story 2: Near the end of the movie, Buster is shown doing the Potty Dance and Slinky accurately guesses that he needs "private time" outside.
• The Transformers: The Movie: When the Decepticons attack Autobot City, Perceptor tells Ultra Magnus that "a cursory evaluation of Decepticon capability indicates a distinct tactical deficiency." In other words, the Autobots are outnumbered.

Films — Live-Action

• In The Cat in the Hat, the Cat doesn't like the word "dog", so he calls Nevins a "canine-American".
• Casper: Dr. Harvey once notes that he considers the terms "ghost" and "dead" to be rude and prefers the phrase "living impaired".
• Paddington (2014): Mr. Brown says that if Paddington doesn't know anyone who can be his guardian, he'll have to be put in a facility. Jonathan asks if he'll be sent to an orphanage, and Mr. Brown insists that it's an "institution for young souls whose parents have sadly passed on".
• Short Circuit: The robot whom the story revolves around accidentally squishes a grasshopper and wants it reassembled. He's told that it can't be done because it's dead and dead is forever. Later, when one of his human friends is being shot at by the villains, he freaks out and screams over and over, "No disassemble Stephanie! No disassemble Stephanie!"
• Wedding Season:
  Nick: I am not snooping. I am collecting information on him without him knowing.

Literature

• Annie's Potty: Throughout the book, pooping is referred to as "making BM".
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: In "The Ugly Truth", the boys in Greg's group take a photo of Tyson's bent elbow and the teachers mistakenly believe they took a photo of someone's "posterior". The guys are confused until they look in a dictionary and find out that it means "butt", much to their amusement.
• The Moomins: In one book, two characters have an argument, which a third character refers to as a "quarrel". One of the arguing characters dislikes this term and insists it's a "dispute".
• Reaper Man: When Death's forced retirement leads to an excess of poltergeist activity, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork assembles various representatives of the city's guilds to find out what's going on. The head of the Alchemist's Guild insists they have nothing to do with it, as anything that goes flying around with them is caused by "unforeseen exothermic reactions", which his aide helpfully translates into Layman's Terms as "things keep blowing up".
• Defied in Shimoneta. The draconian obscenity laws in this universe's Japan bans medical terms and slangs equally for certain parts of the body.

Live-Action TV

• Monty Python's Flying Circus: Among the death euphemisms Mr. Praline uses in the "Dead Parrot" sketch are "expired" and "his metabolic processes are now history".
• My Name Is Earl: In the first episode, Earl calls a gay man "gay" and then decides to call him a "Homosexual-American" to avoid upsetting him.
• Squid Game: In the first episode, Player 324 is caught moving during the game of Red Light, Green Light. The announcer says he's been "eliminated", and he is shot dead.
• The Star Trek franchise:
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: One episode features a villain who lies a lot, but doesn't like to call it lying, preferring the term "dissembling".
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • In "Up the Long Ladder", Worf passes out on the bridge due to having an illness which Dr. Pulaski likens to measles. Worf objects to her use of the term "fainting" to describe the incident, since fainting is considered shameful among Klingons (his species). So, she says that he "suffered a dramatic drop in blood pressure, his blood glucose level dropped, there was deficient blood flow resulting from circulatory failure. In other words, he curled up his toes and lay unconscious on the floor."
    • In "Rascals", when Ro and Guinan (along with two others) have been turned into kids, Guinan asks Ro if she plans on going to her quarters to "pout". Ro says that while she may physically be twelve years old, she's actually not, and thus she's not pouting, but "contemplating her situation".
  • Star Trek: Voyager: In "Nemesis", an alien species called the Vori use the term "nullify" as a euphemism for "murder".
• Whose Line Is It Anyway?: During the "Going Bald" Hoedown, Colin refers to himself as "follicly impaired."
• Worzel Gummidge:
  • In "The Scarecrow Wedding", Aunt Sally is lodged upside-down in an old washing machine. Worzel asks her why, but Aunt Sally, being too arrogant to admit her situation, says, "It is not an old washing machine. For your information, I am lodged in a domestic cleaning appliance!".
  • In one episode, Worzel (a sentient scarecrow) is in danger of being put on a bonfire. Worzel is so scared of fire that he disallows anyone to mention the terms "fire" and "bonfire", so the Crow Man uses the terms "conflagration" and "pyrotechnics".

Video Games

• Animal Crossing: New Leaf: Kapp'n occasionally farts after the first verse of his sea shanties. Sometimes, he'll call it the "wind in [his] southern hemisphere".
• Battle Bears: In Zombies!, the description of the Swearaphone calls swearing "verbal excrement".
• Minecraft: Story Mode: The Warden calls Sunshine Institute a "behavioral adjustment retreat center". The protagonist comments that it's basically a prison and the Warden insists that they do not use "P-word" around here.
• Pokémon Insurgence: When Zenith is accused of putting others under mind control, he claims to prefer the term "mind optimization".
• In Warframe, the Business was an elite field operative for the resistance group Vox Solaris who specialized in "the strategic deletion of life", in stark contrast to his present occupation as a conservationist.

Web Original

• In this Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie fan video, Mr. Krupp releases a Hurricane of Euphemisms for breasts, and among them are "upper private areas", "monopoly mounds", "biological thermometer mounts", "hemispheres", and "child-feeding units".
• In one Confessions Of A Theme Park Worker video, Sir Willow refers to throwing up as a "protein spill".
• Dregs: Mags prefers to call guns "pneumatic weapons".
• TheOdd1sOut: In "Peeing Yourself", when James recalls an incident where he wet his pants at school, he admits, "I did... micturate myself".
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Haley says she's not a thief, but a "freelance wealth redistribution specialist".
  • In this comic, Vaarsuvius claims they didn't sell their soul to fiends, they "negotiated an exchange with three gentlemen from other planes of existence" and that it's a "a fixed-term lease with an occupancy date yet to be determined."
• The Petri Dish:
  • In one strip, Gwog dislikes being called an alien, preferring to be called an "extraterrestrial".
  • Another strip featuring Gwog reveals that Gwog keeps another alien as a pet, but the pet doesn't like being referred to as such, insisting that it's a "symbiotic relationship".
  • In one strip, Thaddeus says that he and the other scientists in his lab "Haven't determined all of the relevant parameters yet". A footnote notes that this is code for "We have no idea what we're doing".
  • In another strip, a scientist asks Gordon what Thaddeus meant when he said that one experiment "had a thermal event", another "underwent an unplanned, rapid disassembly", and a third "experienced a pyrotechnical disconformity". Gordon explains that the first experiment caught fire, the second one exploded, and the third one did both in succession.
• The SCP Foundation prefers "terminated" to "killed". (Interestingly, the Ethics Committee refuses to use such euphemisms internally, so as to keep a clear view of the ethical conundrums they face.)
• In this summary for a Sesame Street episode involving a character (Cyranose de Bergerac) whose Berserk Button is the word "nose", there's one mention of his "n... appendage".
• On This Very Wiki, our term for a wet dream is Nocturnal Emission.
• Tumblr: This post discusses the use of such euphemisms in the scientific community where academics use technical terminology to record the experimental process, which often involve anecdotes that are just as interesting (if not more-so) than the research itself.^note The second link is also discussed in the Real Life section with aerospace engineers.
  blueelectricangels: if you read in a frog paper "specimen was released in the field immediately after capture" chances are very good that what it actually means is
  "i dropped the damn frog and despite the fact that we fell all over each other no one could recapture it"
  […]
  jumpingjacktrash: what is the code entomologists use for "i stepped on it, i'm so sorry, it was dark out and the specimen was very small"
  coolmanfromthepast: "Impromptu dissection was performed under less-than-optimal lighting conditions."
  jumpingjacktrash: 'impromptu dissection' is an alarming phrase in any context and i thank you for it
  inky-petrel: What's biologist for "the little fucker BIT me and I yote it into the undergrowth on reflex"?
  tawghasa: "Specimen was removed from the study pool due to abnormal interaction responses"

Western Animation

• In The Adventures of Tintin, one episode involves a gangster who doesn't like calling himself one, preferring the term "syndicate member".
• The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Genius", Colin calls Gumball a "gluteus maximus" (a butt) when he covers them in spit after he has inflated his own head.
• Bob's Burgers: In "The Unbearable Like-Likeness of Gene", Gene admits to Courtney that he never liked her and that he only stayed with her to get closer to her father Doug. Courtney asks if he was using her, and Gene says he prefers to call it "networking".
• Cow and Chicken: In "Chicken in the Bathroom", Cow and her parents have to use the bathroom quite badly^note Though only the parents need to use the bathroom in the traditional sense; Cow just has to be milked. and they unleash a barrage of euphemisms to describe their urgency. Some of them sound rather fancy, such as Cow saying she needs to "visit the reading room" and the mother saying she wants to "resolve a family crisis".
• Dan Vs.:
  • In "Technology," when Elise reveals that she knows about Barry Ditmer's mind-control devices, Barry says he'd rather say "guiding synaptic processes from afar" instead of "mind control."
  • In "The Dinosaur", Dan says he's "a deceiver, a misleader, and a fabricator", not a liar.
• Futurama: Bender, the trope namer for "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word, claims in "Anthology of Interest I" that he prefers the term "extortion" over "blackmail", though played with as it's not to sound less bad, but because the X makes it sound cooler.
• Grossology: In "Fartzilla", Fartor refers to his older Gary constantly farting on him as "the poisonous emissions of [his] brother's bowels".
• Littlest Pet Shop (2012): In "Hamster Hoods", Dodger and Twist take toys and give them to needier critters. Dodger insists that this isn't stealing, it's "permanent borrowing", and he later calls it "redistribution of wealth".
• The Loud House:
  • Lisa often dabbles in using overly-sophisticated words for small things, some of which are euphemistic, such as telling Lola to move her "oversized posterior" in "Baby Steps".
  • In the titular pilot short (later renamed "Bathroom Break!"), Lincoln says that he has a "pressing engagement" to refer to his Potty Emergency that kicks the plot.
  • In "Linc or Swim", whenever baby Lily poops in the pool, someone calls it a "fecal incident".
  • In "Project Loud House", Lincoln makes burnt eggs for Lucy, which she refers to as "extra well-done".
• Peppa Pig: In one episode, Grandpa Pig drives a wheeled, train-shaped vehicle. When people call it a toy train, he insists it's not a toy train but a "miniature locomotive", and he pronounces "miniature" as "minny-a-ture".
• The Simpsons: In "In Marge We Trust", a younger Ned Flanders is coy about mentioning his butt, so he pauses shyly and then says, "buttocks".
• South Park: In "Free Hat", Steven Spielberg says there will be a re-release of Saving Private Ryan and every utterance of the word "Nazis" will be replaced with "persons with political differences".
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Patrick SmartPants", when Patrick has become an Insufferable Genius due to replacing the top of his head with brain coral, he is being condescending to Sandy. She angrily demands to know if he's calling her dumb and he says she's just "impaired".
• The Venture Bros.: The members of the Guild of Calamitous Intent hate the terms "good guy" and "bad guy" and would rather say "protagonist" and "antagonist" instead.

Real Life

• Aerospace engineers like to call a test plane or rocket blowing up in mid-flight "rapid unplanned disassembly" or "rapid unscheduled disassembly", sometimes abbreviated RUD. This led to some confusion when in 2023 the first orbital test flight of the SpaceX Starship exploded 4 minutes after launch and the official SpaceX Twitter account reported that the spacecraft had undergone an RUD. Observers unfamiliar with the aerospace-engineering in-joke thought the company was trying to put a positive spin on a disaster, when in fact the engineers had expected the rocket to explode sooner than it did and were ecstatic it lasted a whole four minutes before blowing up.
• In the last days of World War II, Hirohito's pre-recorded speech to announce Japan's surrender on 1945 never used words such as "defeat" but rather "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage" and "our empire accepts the provisions of their joint declaration." Combined with the poor sound quality of the speech (which was played on a 78 rpm phonograph over fuzzy radio waves) and Hirohito's use of impenetrably antiquated Japanese, this resulted in an announcer having to follow up the speech by stating in plain terms that Japan was surrendering to the Allies.^note Which, by American standards, isn't all that clear either, despite being spoken in modern Japanese. The announcer did name-check the Potsdam Declaration, but still didn't use the word "surrender"—the closest he used was "[the Emperor] had no choice but to accept [the Potsdam Declaration]."
  • "Withdrawal towards prepared positions" and varieties thereof tend to be the general military equivalent for "retreat", anecdotally attributed to the German propaganda in the same war once the Soviets gained the upper hand on the Eastern front.
• "Vertically challenged" is sometimes used as a (usually tongue-in-cheek) euphemism for "short".
  • In the same vein, "follically challenged" can be used for "bald".
• The euphemism treadmill surrounding the words "idiot," "imbecile," and "moron" became increasingly reliant on this with each iteration. Originally, all three terms referred to different classes of intellectual disability, but when they became generic insults of intelligence, they were replaced with "mentally retarded," the idea being that "retard" was too technical-sounding (coming from the Latin word for slowness) to enter the popular vernacular. Not only did it do exactly that, but by the late 2000s it was considered an outright slur, leading it to be deprecated in formal usage in favor of "mental impairment," then "intellectual disability."
• The aviation safety term "controlled flight into terrain" (CFIT) is sometimes misunderstood as a Technical Euphemism for "plane crash." In fact, it's a completely transparent term for a specific kind of plane crash: one in which the pilots, while retaining control of a plane in full working order, crash it either because of not knowing where the ground is (e.g. flying it into a mountain), or on purpose.
• An old joke among scientists is that certain phrases in research papers should be read in this manner. Examples include: "the sample was slightly damaged" means "we dropped it on the floor", "statistically significant" means "it repeated like twice", "representative sample of the data" means "we picked the best-looking ones", and "we thank Dr X for help during the preparation of experiment" in the acknowledgment section means X did all the dirty work.

---