On the Functions of Euphemism in Social Communication

In the process of social linguistic communication,due to the different circumstances and conditions,people can not express certain things clearly in a direct way when they come across some thing painful,unpleasant,disgusted and even embarrassing.Instead,they have to use somevague,implicit,mild and euphemistic expressions,so as to achieve the purpose of expressing feelings and exchanging ideas and thoughts in an appropriate and light atmosphere.This paper tries to deal with the application of euphemisms in various fields,thereby reveal some main functions of euphemism,i.e.avoidance function,politeness function,gloss-over function and disguise function.