Beyond pain and sorrow: Dysphemistic use in wartime funeral cards.

Abstract

As little attention has been paid to dysphemism in death-related discourse, the goal of this study is to analyze the dysphemistic language in a sample of funeral cards, i.e., personalized keepsakes distributed at memorial or funeral services, of Nationalist Spaniards, including both combatants and civilians, who were killed in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and, by doing so, have access to the motivations and purposes underlying dysphemistic use in wartime funeral cards. The inductive, "bottom-up" analysis carried out demonstrates that dysphemism is used to express a negative evaluation of the political enemy through intense and emotionally charged language that refers to the cause and circumstances of the death, on the one hand, and to those responsible for the death, on the other. In this way, dysphemism creates a narrative atmosphere charged with contempt and hatred toward the political enemy and thus becomes a strategic tool of ideological propaganda.