The patrolman had the misfortune to be assigned a beat that ran past the house of Ms. McDougall, a notorious prattler and neighborhood gossip.

'You mean they may have left their Barclaycards behind?' 'You never know, sir.'

Linguists are familiar with the phenomenon, which may be called the euphemism treadmill. People invent new words for emotionally charged referents, but soon the euphemism becomes tainted by association, and a new word must be found, which soon acquires its own connotations, and so on.

Readers narrativize such texts by resorting to the experiencing frame, overruling the oddity in pronominal usage that makes such texts difficult […]