According to the Cambridge Dictionary, an euphemism is a word or phrase used to avoid saying an unpleasant or offensive word. I wonder why nowadays we need to use euphemisms to say that a woman is pregnant. Is pregnancy still regarded as a taboo subject?
Anyway, I have been searching a couple of dictionaries in order to find out whether some terms which stand for ‘pregnant' are euphemisms or not. Although it may well be argued that some words are rather old-fashioned, apparently they are still frequent in everyday conversations. Moreover, there seems to be no consensus among lexicographers when it comes to classifying the synonyms. They might appear in dictionaries and websites as idioms, slangs, informal language, euphemisms, and so on. No matter what we call these expressions, some of them undoubtedly have a humorous effect. Don’t you think so?
Believe it or not, I have found out that the expression 'in the family way', in the course of time, has acquired a more derogatory tone and has been used to refer to unmarried pregnant women. Does it imply that society still expects pregnant women to be married and, consequently, that the use of an euphemism instead of the word ‘pregnant' reveals prejudice?
All things considered, are there any equivalent expressions / euphemisms in your native language? In Portuguese, which is my mother tongue, for instance, we say : ‘estar em estado interessante’, 'estar buchuda', whose literal translation into English would be ‘to be in an interesting state' and ‘with a big belly’. The former term is an euphemism, whereas the latter is just a colloquial word. Apart from the terms quoted above, we use the expression ‘estar esperando a cegonha', which means exactly the same as ‘to expect the visit from the stork.' Interestingly enough, in both languages storks are associated with delivering babies.
If you are a native speaker of English, could you please let me know the expressions you use nowadays?
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