2 Setting : in Sherlock’s room
3 Context of Situation : Sherlock has a meeting with
clients, a married couple, and talk about the disappearance of their money in a shared bank account. Using his
deductive analysis skill, Sherlock solves the case on the spot.
b. Euphemism and Meaning
The word affair is a euphemism for ‘cheating’. The type of this
euphemism is borrowing. The word affair comes from the French à
faire which means ‘to do’.
The type of meaning of this euphemism is reflected meaning.
Reflected meaning is “the meaning which arises in cases of multiple conceptual meaning, when one sense of a word forms part of our
response to another sense.”
4
The word affair does not always mean cheating on your lover, but it can also mean several things like:
‘needing money’ in the phrase financial affair; ‘diplomacy with neighbor country’ in the phrase foreign affair; etc. However, if the
word affair stands alone without its collocative, we, most of the time, will connect it to cheating, or love affair.
7. Give his life Episode 01
S: “Why would an agent give his life to tell us something incredibly
insignificant? Thats whats strange.”
4
Geoffrey Leech, op.cit., 1985, p. 9 pp. 16-17
J: “Give his life?” S: “According to Mycroft, theres an underground network planning
an attack on London, thats all we know.”
a. Context 1 Characters
: John J and Sherlock S 2 Setting
: in Sherlock’s room 3 Context of Situation: Sherlock is telling John that
according to Mycroft, there is an agent who died to get information about an underground network planning an
attack on London.
b. Euphemism and Meaning
The phrase give his life is a euphemism for ‘died’. The type of this
euphemism is indirection because there are more direct ways to
speak about an agent who died on duty, like ‘an agent died’, or ‘an agent got killed in action’, or even ‘an agent passed away’. However,
talking about someone’s death directly does not feel right, especially when this someone is an agent who died in his attempt to catch
terrorists. That is why the type of meaning of this euphemism is
affective meaning. The agent who died was a hero for revealing the
terrorist’s plan, and by saying give his life is Sherlock’s way to honor his work. Moreover, he is talking to John, a retired soldier who cares
about this kind of thing.
