Reading the papers - by which I mean browsing their online screen pages - I notice a new & particularly insidious form of euphemism: "life changing injuries".

By using this phrase the headline writer manages to avoid specifying the medically precise (& therefore presumably unpalatable) facts while simultaneously provoking the imagination into devising all sorts of horrors.

This kind of fusion of squeamish recoil & prurient relish seems especially apt (& revealing) for our times.