Huge Cajones Remailer wrote:
At 8:30 PM 12/13/1996, Timothy C. May wrote:[snip] Now for some entertainment. Oliver Wendell Holmes, when he was a judge in Virginia, ordered the forcible sterilization of several young women. The state would wait until they became ill and then when they were admitted to a hospital, they were sterilized under the guise of giving them some other operation. Holmes claimed that the grandmothers of the women were imbeciles, their mothers were imbeciles, and that they were imbeciles. His great line was "Three generations of imbeciles are enough!" Curiously, it turns out that the word "imbecile" was a euphemism for "illegitimate".
I have heard that in 1800's England, there were cases of children starving to death (even on farms) where the euphemism applied was something like "apoplexy" or whatever, to suggest a disease rather than neglect. But we have some goodies here in the late 20th century too, yes?