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ous reason for being. They can conceal the things people fear most —death, the dead or the supernatural. Euphemisms can also eliminate unhappiness, embarrassment and fear etc. so as to relieve people psychologically. 3.2 Politeness Politeness is another very important function that euphemisms serve in social life. "Some of the euphemisms are used to avoid crudeness and indecency for the sake of a polite conversation."[15] Grice formulated Cooperative Principle of utterance in which the Maxim of Manner was defined as “Be perspicuous and specific; To avoid obscurity; To avoid ambiguity; To be brief and to be orderly.” The roundabout nature of euphemisms goes against the Maxim of Manner, which can only be fairly explained well by Leech’s Politeness Principle “Approbation Maxim: minimize dispraise of other, maximize praise of other”. In other words, euphemisms are to minimize impolite expressions and maximize polite expressions. 3.3 Disguise Besides the two functions of euphemisms mentioned above, there is still another one more important function at work in euphemistic communication, namely, the Disguise Function. Here we mean that because of the vagueness of euphemisms, it has become a very important tool for political leaders or the diplomats or statesmen to distort the facts or and present a false picture of peace and prosperity and to beautify whatever the authority have done. For example, in the Iraq War, they use “Operation Iraqi Freedom” for beautifying their military invasion, “possible movement” refers to military attack, “air operation” or “air strikes” for air attack, “enter the war” to show their reluctance to fight the war etc. and we may find many such kind of these euphemisms in press conferences. The most important and ultimate function or purpose of the use of diplomatic euphemisms in press conferences is to disguise or beautify their invasive essence or other evil actions or the separation of words from truth. In American and British societies nowadays, diplomatic euphemisms are always purposely devised to disguise scandals in wars and politics, deliberately invented to beautify lowly occupations and excessively inflated to promote sales in advertisement. 4. The Cooperative Principle Before going on, we look at two examples, as follows: (1) "A: Can you tell me the time? B: Well, the mail has already come. (2) A: Are you going to John’s birthday party? B: I’ve heard Mary is going."[16] It seems there are some mistake in the conversations. But in fact, it is correct. The Cooperative Principle will help us understand more. The Cooperative Principle is as follows:" Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged."[17] According Grice, Cooperative principle is classified into four categories: quantity, quality, relation and manner. The category of quantity relates to the quantity ofinformation to be provided, and under it fall the following maxims： 4.1 The maxim of Quality: "Try to make your contribution one that is true, .specifically: (i) do not say what you believe to be false. (ii) do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence"[18] 4.2 The maxim of Quantity: "(i) Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange (ii) Do not make your contribution more informative than is required"[19] 4.3 The m