Kirk Mahoney . com

I suspect that all of my U.S. readers have read or heard the adjective “pre-owned” in automobile advertising over the past several years.

This adjective seems to have begun with the dealers of higher-end automobiles as a euphemism for the adjective “used”.

“Used” apparently sounded too cheap, so dealers of such brands as Lexus and Infiniti started to use “pre-owned” instead to describe the same-brand vehicles in their used-car lots.

Contrary to my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis, it seems that nearly all auto-dealership advertisers today — no matter whether they carry luxury cars or econo-boxes — choose a two-syllable, nine-character word over a one-syllable, four-letter word that says the same thing.

But that is a frequent characteristic of euphemisms: People go out of their way to avoid what they believe will be perceived negatively.

If you find yourself saying or writing a longer word when you know that a shorter word will express the same thing, notice whether you are trying to hide a negative perception behind that longer word.