Based on cognitive semantics,this paper studies the semantic obscurity and elevation mechanism in English euphemisms for occupations.By applying the cognitive metaphor and metonymy theory,we find that conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy both play an extremely important role in euphemisms for occupations.With a mapping between the whole and the parts within one domain metonymy mainly works to achieve semantic obscurity,while metaphor mainly serves to achieve semantic elevation with a cross-domain map...