Abstract: The inspiration source for writing this article became the detected in scientific literature fusion of terms and concepts denoted by them. The object of this research is the concepts of “taboo”, “political correctness” and “euphemism”. The subjects is the key characteristics: functional and semantic peculiarities that allow correlating these concepts. The analysis captures the contamination of dictionary definitions, as well as examples from the texts of modern media. The author examines such aspects of the topic, as the general characteristics of taboo, political correctness and euphemism, their semantic structure and function. Special attention is given to interpretation, search of the  meeting points, and demarcation of the notions. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that for the first time these concepts are being analyzed “in tandem”, and that taboo is viewed in relation to euphemism and political correctness as a linguistic phenomenon (word-taboo) and non-linguistic phenomenon (rule-taboo). The main conclusions consist in the following: firstly, reasoned confirmation of the diversity of the concepts of taboo, political correctness and euphemism; secondly, correlation between the word-taboo and euphemism as the “replaced” and “replacing”; and thirdly, the determination that rule-taboo and political correctness are two powerful boosts for creation and utilization of euphemisms.

Abstract: In her article Zvereva presents the results of her analysis of modern euphemisms and their linguistic ecological evaluation. The subject of the research is the influence of euphemisms on the quality of linguistic environment, i.e. ecology of speech, ecology of language and language consciousness of speakers. The researcher focuses on the analysis of euphemism as a linguistic, cultural, social and psychological product that may point out important issues and processes in the language environment. In addition, the researcher also focuses on facts of dynamic development and extension of euphemistic synonymic row. To analyze the research data, Zvereva has applied the random sampling technique, the contextual analysis method, and description analytical method as the leading method. The novelty of the research is caused by the new approach to analysing eumphemisms (their linguo-ecological evaluation) and the fact that it has been an important issue during the period since 2014 till 2019. The results of the analysis demonstrate that economics, labor relations, sport and other human-related topics are subject to euphemization most of all. The topic 'human age' has over 20 different euphemisms describing the same denotation. This fact demonstrates that there is a conflict in the language consciousness of Russian speakers which is a negative linguo-ecological phenomenon. However, there is also a positive tendency towards active qualitative speech creativity. The conclusions made by the author of the article will be useful for linguo-culturological, socio-linguistic and psycholinguistic research.