In the chapter titled "Mentalese" in his textbook The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker criticizes the notion (attributed to George Orwell) that governments can manipulate our minds through the use of euphemisms ("Newspeak" in Orwell's novel, 1984). In his effort to discredit this notion, Pinker mentions the following Monty Python sketch, which is full of euphemisms for "dead"--that fool no one (though that's not really the point of using them here ...)
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