Euphemisms are a part of language which enable the discussion of taboo topics, without
directly naming those taboos. Previous work suggests that women use euphemisms more
than men do. However, there has been no quantitative attempt to test this proposal. We
develop a simple computational method to investigate whether men and women use
euphemism differently in the Canadian Hansard and US Congressional datasets. For a set
of taboo-euphemism pairs (eg died-passed away), we computed the relative frequency of …