A coworker told me that, while shopping at a toystore, he found a stuffed, plush Darth Vader. It has a chip inside which has one of Vader's lines, I don't recall which, but something ominous about the future being ruled by the Dark Side.
Cuddly Darth-- yeah, I don't see it.
Hmm, the difference between skin and leather is pretty nearly the same as the difference between, say, pork and ham. It's not really a euphemism at all-- the latter in both cases has been processed and preserved, while the former terms are either specifically a raw flesh, or else a general term that I consider fairly useless.
Some of the linguistic strangeness of English is a reflection of it's multi-cultural roots. Words like pork come from French, while others come from a multitude of other languages. Thus English has more words because it borrows from so many other languages.
All true. I guess my point was that it might me think differently about leather goods if I always called them "skin"