Taboos are expressive indicators of the location of a society in its cultural history. Linguistic taboos in particular can be approached via euphemisms, which are observed and interpreted here in a comparison between French and Italian. Their raison d'être is explained from the perspective of cultural and mental history, and from the perspective of the history of motifs they are anchored in fields ranging from the magical and religious via the ethical and aesthetic and the politically correct through to an "ethics without morality". In this, the sources, motives and functions of the phenomenon of the euphemism are considered separately and then brought together in an overall interpretation.