Short answers, pulled from the story.
Euphemism comes from the ancient Greek word euphemia, a compound of eu, meaning "good" or "well", and pheme, meaning "prophetic speech" or "rumour". The ancient Greeks themselves used the term to mean "to keep a holy silence", speaking well by not speaking at all. The word is connected to Eupheme, a female Greek spirit associated with words of praise and positivity.
The euphemism treadmill is a name coined by Steven Pinker for the process, originally described in 1974 by University of Oregon linguist Sharon Henderson Taylor as the euphemism cycle, by which a polite substitute word gradually absorbs the negative connotations of the thing it was meant to soften and must itself be replaced. The history of words for the room where people relieve themselves - from privy-house to house-of-office to toilet to restroom - is a frequently cited example.
As early as 1939, Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich used the German term Sonderbehandlung, meaning "special treatment", to refer to summary execution. When Heinrich Himmler recognized the word had become understood as a term for murder, he replaced it with language describing victims as being "guided" and "evacuated" to the camps. These formulations became part of the language of the Endlosung der Judenfrage, the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", which was exposed to the outside world during the Nuremberg Trials.
A minced oath is a euphemism formed by altering the pronunciation or spelling of a taboo word just enough to reduce its offence. Examples include "Jeez" for Jesus, "frickin" for a stronger profanity, and "darn" for damn. Feck is a minced oath for "fuck" that originated in Hiberno-English and became widely known outside Ireland through the British sitcom Father Ted.
Algospeak refers to the use of euphemisms online to avoid triggering automated content moderation on platforms such as Meta and TikTok. Users substitute words or phonetic variants that preserve meaning for human readers while evading algorithmic detection. It has been observed in discussions related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The term venereal disease linked contagion with Venus, the goddess of love, as a softening device; as venereal became associated with the infection rather than the goddess, it lost its deflecting force and was abbreviated to VD. This was later replaced by STD, and then by STI, with the shift from "disease" to "infection" intended to reduce stigma for patients who test before showing symptoms.