It usually pretty tough to find something I agree with in the opinion pages of the Boston Globe, but a piece on using language to defeat meaning pushes my like button.
As a matter of respecting widespread sensibilities, it is all well and good to console a tyke who has fallen on his "tail." And that pretty thing over there is not "tail;" it is a woman. Law Dog has, to our amused profit, spread "wedding tackle" far and wide in libertarian Blogville. There's no particular harm in referring to the dead as those who have "passed away."
"But telling citizens that torture is “abuse” and mercenaries are “contractors” — or in Orwell’s words, that burning and bombing villages is “pacification” — is a different sort of enterprise. These euphemisms — the top-down terminology invented and deployed to serve the interests of the coiners — are the ones that give “euphemism” a bad name."
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