COVID-19 is the major health crisis worldwide nowadays. Linguistic aspects of individuals and communities, including euphemism and dysphemism, were affected by this global challenge because choosing appropriate words to express what speakers intend to say and to reflect what they value or disvalue is a basic part of communication. Euphemism is an acceptable expression used instead of an offensive one to avoid unpleasant connotations, while dysphemism is a derogatory expression with negative suggestions used instead of neutral or polite one to attack something or someone. This paper investigates the use of euphemism and dysphemism in the Jordanian society for dealing with COVID-19. The research was approached from a sociolinguistic perspective and framed mainly within the Theory of Euphemism and Dysphemism by Allan and Burridge (1991;2006) together with Warren's model of euphemism (1992) and Lakoff and Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory (1980). A sample of 200 Jordanians was asked to respond to a questionnaire including demographic information and closed-ended and open-ended questions. The results show that the Jordanians used different euphemistic techniques in daily COVID-19 conversations, namely, metaphor, shift from Arabic into English, medical terms, and abbreviation. They show that the participants hardly adopted dysphemisms when talking about COVID-19. This paper contributes to the limited investigation of 'pandemic discourse', and to the understanding of euphemistic and dysphemistic tendencies of Jordanians during global crises. Researchers are recommended to explore paralinguistic features of speakers, namely, hand gestures, facial expressions, eye movements, body language, and tone and pitch of voice, while discussing COVID-19 themes.

Covid-19 pandemic constitutes the greatest threat to the worldwide population and countries nowadays. Donald Trump, the president of the greatest country in the world, has frequently received heavy criticism as a result of his language use in the period of Covid-19. Therefore, the present paper examines dysphemistic expressions used in Trump's discourse on Covid-19. A sample of dysphemistic examples adopted in Trump's daily speeches in a

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This paper aims to investigate the role of intratextuality and contextuality in the mechanisms of understanding euphemism in the Qur’an, which in some cases would provide evidence for the intended meaning or a way of interpreting and translating euphemisms. It hypothesises that the dependence only on dictionary, exegesis or single text may yield misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the euphemistic meaning. The paper develops a linguistic model for critical evaluation of the translation of Qur’anic euphemisms based on the textual level, which goes beyond word or sentence levels. Methodologically, certain euphemisms in different verses in the Qur’an which require intratextual or contextual references for their identification and interpretation are selected and then possible interpretations of their meanings are verified via checking semantic coherence with other Qur’anic verses. The size of the selected sample is representative to cover the most common taboos in any society; namely health, death, sex and sodomy. Six translations of these euphemistic expressions of the Qur’an are fully analysed. The paper gives evidence that translation decisions made by translators need to rely on information beyond traditional dictionaries or exegetic works and require the recognition of intratextual and contextual ties within the Qur’an. It also finds that most translators attempt to convey the intended meaning of euphemisms, while the euphemistic style is sacrificed. The study concludes that the translation of euphemism in the Qur’an should adhere to the syntactic patterns and lexical units of the source language (SL) structure, and make cultural and linguistic shifts in the target language (TL).

This study investigates the key forms of address used amongst Jordanian university students, the impact of gender on using these forms and what accounts for the variation in their address system. By addressing the issue of normativity and heterogeneity in the use of address terms, in different social settings, the study enriches the understanding of the internal variation of the address term system. Data collected through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were analysed, based on Watts’ discursive approach to politeness and Agha’s approach of indexicality. The results revealed that the identified normative patterns represent Jordanian university politic behaviours, which index different social meanings and relations among the youth community, in relation to specific social contexts. The most frequent strategies university students use for addressing others are personal names, innovative terms, descriptive phrases, pronouns, titles, teknonyms, and religious, military, attention attractors, as well as a combination of these terms. It also seems that there are no absolute stable patterns of address term usage among the youth community, speaking Jordanian Arabic. Rather, there is an infinite society-internal heterogeneity in the address terms usage. The results also revealed that an intra-group variation signifies social struggles over the norms of address term usage and potentially normative incertitude.