Sometimes I'm reduced to using them, but I hate them. Examples:
Make love
Pee
'Pee', of course, is simply the letter 'P', short for 'piss'.
Anyway, I was interested, upon reading this article about poetry, to discover that there's a woman poet who has similar (probably not quite the same) feelings on the matter, particularly in relation to the word 'cunt':
For McHugh, the tenuous nature of utterances makes it that much more important to say an actual thing. (As Alice Fulton writes in "Failure," "The Kings are boring, forever/ legislating where the sparkles/ in their crowns will be. Regal is easy.") Her mouth washed out with soap for saying the word "cunt" she says "vagina for a day or two, but knew/from that day forth which word/struck home like sex itself." She wants no tepid synonym, and this early censorship-at her mother's hand-inspires an appetite for the right word: "I knew/when I was big I'd sing//a song in praise of cunt," that word "with teeth in it."
Of course, it’s impossible to say an “actual thing”, in the sense that all words are merely symbolic representations of “actual things”.And I feel it is important that some of these symbols be considered mild, and others harsh; arguing that one must always use the loudest symbols is like arguing that one must always shout and never speak softly — the language is richer for having both. This is my objection to the idea that lingual taboos must be broken.
Yes.Actually, in the poem excerpted from she expresses a fondness for euphemisms before… Hang on, I’ll have to find the whole thing:http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=oSItEgfAlZQC&pg=PA29&lpg=PA29&dq=heather+mchugh+i+knew+i%27d+sing&source=bl&ots=MGRWEUZQhp&sig=qXBvd5dqjgk2zMG7kHXdEguXLGk&hl=en&ei=Zl6nSqycE8KgjAfE3om2CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#v=onepage&q=heather%20mchugh%20i%20knew%20i%27d%20sing&f=falseSo, actually, that point of view is more that of the person who wrote the article than it is of Heather McHugh. Also, it’s only actually some euphemisms that I hate. Some I find to be creative or funny. But ‘make love’, for instance, seems to me a phrase that only Inspector Clouseau can use without it sounding emetic.