Hi, during the following sentences, from "Liberals are enjoying a comeback" by Catherine Rampell, I cannot understand the meaning of the red part. Would you please explain it to me. Thanks for any help.
And the term’s potency as an insult would only grow, with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush portraying the term as so repellent that it required the faux-euphemism “L-word” instead.
When we want to refer to a swear word without actually saying the word, we say, for example 'the F-word' (for 'f*ck'). By extension, people sometimes use the structure to indicate a word that is repellent to them – in this case Reagan and Bush hated Liberals so much they used 'the L-word' (L for Liberal) instead.
JustKate
Senior Member
English - US
Here "l-word" means "liberal." The idiom (or whatever you want to call it) of referring to a particular word by its first letter followed by -word (l-word, f-word, etc.) implies that the word being referred to is difficult to say, either because it's obscene or crude or because it's frightening in some way. For example, it's not easy to tell someone you love that person, so love is sometimes referred to as "the l-word." It's a sort of mild joke.
Here, the writer is saying that there was a time when the concept of being a "liberal" was so hated that people referred to it by the euphemism "l-word," just as they might refer to "f*ck" as "the f-word."
(Cross-posted with Chez)
