Abstract

As a social phenomenon the politically correct is very recent and operate in the perspective of defending the individual rights of marginalized segments In this context the object of this study refers to the politically correct language PCL which can be defined as the process of substitution of stigmatized variants for others that are considered positive or neutral Thus the purpose of this paper is to present the euphemism as an internal mechanism of functioning of the PCL justified by the need to reflect on prestige variants in three semantic fields disability blackness and homosexuality The corpus covers online collection of the newspaper Folha de S Paulo an important Brazilian journal As a result euphemism in PCL i softens pejorative meanings ii inscribe new meanings in variants in use iii is also associated with technical variants in areas such as health and law and finally iv can also be exaggerated contributing to other negative meanings