Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Euphemisms are a part of language which enable the discussion of taboo topics, without directly naming those taboos.Previous work suggests that women use euphemisms more than men do. However, there has been no quantitative attemptto test this proposal. We develop a simple computational method to investigate whether men and women use euphemismdifferently in the Canadian Hansard and US Congressional datasets. For a set of taboo-euphemism pairs (e.g. died-passedaway), we computed the relative frequency of the euphemism in speech from female and male speakers. Preliminaryevidence from these two political datasets show that women do use the euphemistic expressions more than men do, butthey also use the taboo expressions more. Future work should investigate whether the same pattern holds in data fromdifferent domains.