EUPEN, a frontier town of Rhenish Prussia, government of Aix-la-Chapelle, and 11 miles S.S.W. of the town
of that name. It stands in a pleasant valley on the Vesdre, an affluent of the Meuse, and is one of the principal manufacturing towns of Prussia. The manufactures are chiefly fine woollen cloths and cassimeres. Pop. (1849) 12,573, principally descendants of French Protestants, who took refuge here subsequently to the revocation of the edict of Nantes.
EUPHEMISM (εὐφημία, to speak well of), in Rhetoric, a figure in which a delicate word or expression is substituted for one that is harsh or offensive; as in the use of "departed" or "deceased" for "dead." Among the ancients the use of euphemisms was very frequent, arising from a superstitious dread of using certain words and phrases that were regarded as ominous or unlucky. Hence Horace's "male ominatis parcere verbis." For the same reason the Furies were called by the Greeks Eumenides, q.d., the gracious ones.