succession, a constant exchange of utterances, of verbal acts that are characterised by the important quality of being significant, or possessing a meaning, a key whose knowledge guarantees its comprehension’ (Acero et al., 1989: 33-34).

Therefore, the traditional difference between use (emission) and mention (using a word not to refer to it per se) poses the problem of meaning on which linguists and philosophers of language have hitherto debated at great length (Chomsky, 1987). As a matter of fact, numerous and very varied attempts have been made to clarify the complex relationships underlying meaning, ranging from Plato’s (1925: 56-113) psychologism in semantics addressed in his Seventh Letter, and its subsequent rejection by Frege (1971), to Hempel (1966) and Quine (1980), through a long list of authors. Operatively speaking, we endorse the summary offered by Leech (1981 [1974]: 1):

The word ‘meaning’ and its corresponding verb ‘to mean’ are among the eminently discussable terms in the English language, and semanticists have often seemed to spend an immoderate amount of time puzzling out the ‘meanings of meaning’ as a supposedly necessary preliminary to the study of their subject. Perhaps the best-known book ever written on semantics, that which C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards published in 1923, has the very title The Meaning of Meaning, and contained, on pp. 186–7, a list of as many as twenty-two definitions of the word, taking different non-theoretical or theoretical starting points.

In particular, Leech (1981 [1974]: 1) underscores a number of definitions of the word ‘meaning’, which will serve a function here by helping to understand the worldview that it shapes in speakers, including the following:

1) an intrinsic property

2) the other words annexed to a word in the dictionary

3) the connotation of a word

4) the practical consequences of a thing in our future experience

5) that to which the interpreter of a symbol

a. refers

b. believes himself to be referring

c. believes the user to be referring.

1.1. Euphemisms

In the analysis of identifiable and recognisable vocabulary as regards the creation of euphemisms during the pandemic, the classification that Chamizo Domínguez (2004) has appropriately proposed will be employed here. In brief, Chamizo considers euphemisms and dysphemisms as particular examples of metaphors with which there is a transfer of properties from one thing to another that does not possess them, but whose mass use tends to lead to a lexical modification, whereby creating semantic fields and word families. As in the process of literary and poetic creation when in the frame of the poiesis the writer or poet attempts to express the indescribable by resorting to the creation of metaphors, the same occurs with euphemisms, albeit disassociated from the aesthetics of the former.

Furthermore, Chamizo (2004: 45) highlights the importance of use for perpetuating euphemisms: