Forget sugarcoating, just say it as it is!

IWAS watching MasterChef the other night and a contestant said she had lost her aunt. For a split second I genuinely thought she had gone missing. But no, of course, she meant she had died. Which got me thinking about all the words or descriptions we circumvent for fear of upsetting or offending. Why don’t we say it as it is?

My parent’s generation were guilty of this and it’s passed on to mine.

Nothing in the nether regions was ever classified by name. The word ‘period’ was not bandied about. In fact if the word came up in any other context, we all skitted, laughing behind our hands. It was called ‘the other business’ or some of my friends used to say things like “my auntie has arrived”. Nobody ever queried as to which auntie they were referring. Everyone knew the code words. She’s not feeling well because her auntie has arrived was a normal kind of sentence.

I don’t think I ever heard my mother use the word ‘cancer’. She’d say “She’s very unwell” — and if she was dying it was “she’s very, very unwell”. They didn’t talk about dying either. And we still don’t. We talk about people passing. She passed away, he passed on...

I’m equally guilty. I say to the kids “if anything ever happens to me”. What I mean is “If I drop dead in the morning”, but I don’t want to upset their little brains by using the word ‘dead’. Come to think of it, they would probably not be upset at all. Jumping for joy more like.

When I was in hospital recently the nurses asked me every morning if I had “opened my bowels”. Not “did you do a poo?” I felt I needed a key to access my own body.

Foreigners must be baffled by our ability to sugarcoat the facts as they really are.