euphemism

“The word style is originally derived from the Latin word ‘stylus’ which meant a short stick sharp at one end and flat at the other used by the Romans for writing on wax tablets”(Galperin 11). Nowadays the word “stylus” according to Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary means “a special pen used to write a text or draw an image on a special computer screen.” We clearly see that the meaning of the word style has been changed greatly. According to Longman dictionary “style is a particular set of rules for using words, forming documents, spelling”, etc. The word is applied to the teaching of how to write a composition; it is also used to reveal the correspondence between thought and expression, etc. (ibid. 11). The most frequent definition of style is expressed by Seymour Chatman who defines style as “a product of individual choices and patterns of choices among linguistic possibilities” (Chatman 30).
Stylistics is a branch of general linguistics. It is the study and interpretation of texts from a linguistic perspective. Stylistic devices and expressive means are involved in stylistics. Stylistics observes not only the nature of expressive means of the language, but their capacity of becoming a stylistic device. “Stylistic device is a conscious and intentional literary use of some of the facts of the language, that is, the most essential structural and semantic features of the language forms are viewed as generalizations, or a generative model” (Shakhovsky 92). Stylistic devices function in texts as marked units and they always carry some kind of, either emotive or logical, information (Galperin 30).
“Words in context may acquire additional lexical meanings which are not fixed in dictionaries, what we have called contextual meanings”(ibid. 138). Words that are used in context do not have the same meaning as it is fixed in dictionaries. In this case we deal with the so-called