Background of the Study
respectively.
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On the other hand, the examples from television that will be shown in this research are from Sherlock Serial TV season 3, for it is the
corpus that will be discussed in this research. Sherlock is a famous British Serial TV presenting a modern adaptation
of Sherlock Holmes detective novel written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The story of Sherlock revolves around Sherlock Holmes, a consulting detective,
assisting the Metropolitan Police Service to solve various crimes with the help of his best friend and roommate, Dr John Watson, who has returned
from war in Afghanistan. There are many adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, such as; comic strip,
movies, and Serial TV; but the writer decided to analy e this particular
Sherlock season 3 because this one is the latest adaptation and very famous worldwide, so the writer expected this series can represent the nature of
British TV. British TV has one of the toughest rules in term of censorship since the
infamous murder of a 2-year-old boy, James Bulger by two 10-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables in 1993. There were several
experts linking the murder with violent videos aired on TV and it made British government tighten the rule of TV censorship related to sexual
impropriety, blasphemy, and foul language. Sherlock Serial TV season 3 are interesting to discuss because there are
many euphemistic terms in it. For example, in episode 02, Sherlock said “She his mother understands
er little.” when talking to Mrs. Hudson.
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Mida Sulfiana, Euphemism of American High School Mo ie: The Stud
of Meaning Relations and Semantic Change. Jakarta: State Islamic University Syarif Hidayatullah, 2012, pp. 29-30
His utterance implies that he thinks that his own mother is stupid. He euphemi
es his sentence because no matter how stupid his mother is according to his own judgment, she is still his mother. Therefore, he
softens his sentence into an acceptable sentence to be heard by Mrs. Hudson. Another example, also from episode 02, John describes ‘butt itch’ as
afferent neurons in the peripheral ner ous s
stem. John said this, when talking to Sherlock, as a euphemism as well as to make pride himself as a
doctor. Those are two examples of euphemisms in Sherlock Serial TV season 3
which will be the corpus of this thesis entitled Euphemism in Sherlock Serial TV Season 3. This research is limited to euphemisms used by John
Watson and Sherlock Holmes because these two have the most screen time in the whole Sherlock season 3. It means that their chances to speak or
mention euphemisms are higher compared to the other characters. The writer did not find any euphemism used by John or Sherlock in episode 03,
so analysis will be focused on episode 01 and 02. In analy
ing the euphemism, the writer used theory proposed by Hugh Rawson from the book A Dictionar
of Euphemisms Other Doubletalk 1981 while meaning of those euphemisms will be analy
ed using the theory proposed by Geoffrey Leech from the book Semantics: the St
u
of Meaning 1985 and Hyme’s Theory of context as cited in Brown 1983.
The writer found several previous researches of euphemism, and most of them used Keith Allan and Kate Burridge’s theory, so the writer wanted
to seek a different approach in analy ing the euphemisms using Rawson’s
theory. After analy ing the euphemisms, the writer analy
ed the meanings of those euphemisms using Leech’s theory of meaning and Hyme’s theory
of context.