> “The issue of political correctness / euphemisation is that, in establishing distance, it must perform avoidance.”

This physical-object model is not particularly novel thinking. You could just as easily use a time model and say PC adds evaluation time, or semantic model and say it adds cognitive load, or semiotic model and say PC adds more syntagmatic nodes. None of which has the unfortunate “avoidance” concept merely because physics doesn’t like two things occupying the same space.