Sense and sensibility, selfies and sweat

AWOMAN was talking about the difficulties of dressing for warm weather. What colour to wear? “Black had its drawbacks, as it attracts heat,” she explained, “and bright colours pose a problem too, because if you were to, well... I don’t even want to say the word.”

Language changes all the time but the internet has speeded up the rate of that change and it can be hard to keep up with what’s correct, polite, acceptable. Change brings new words, like ‘selfie’, ‘cyber’, ‘mansplaining’, ‘facepalm’. It also sees the re-purposing of existing words like ‘gay’, ‘cloud’, and ‘friend’ used as a verb.

Then there is our long-standing love of euphemisms which has accelerated too. Once used mainly to make concepts more acceptable in polite company (‘breaking wind’, ‘birds and the bees’) or to downplay a concept (‘big-boned’, ‘between jobs’), they’ve now got political, either to make a statement (‘freedom fighter’ vs ‘terrorist’) or to replace a term deemed offensive (African American).

Between euphemisms and changes it has got to the stage where no one dies any more, they don’t even pass away that often — instead they pass. To complicate it further there are also the sensibilities of your audience. As a kid I was amazed to hear the English found the term ‘belly button’ vulgar, they said ‘tummy button’.

So, what was it that my lady of the colour hesitated to say? I was convinced she wanted a nice way to say ‘incontinence’. But then she whispered the all but unnameable horror — it was ‘sweat’. “What if you were to sweat?” The sweat threw me. But then I got hung up on the ‘if ’. If ? IF you sweat?