This paper examines the linguistic features and pragmatic strategies employed by people suffering from socially stigmatized diseases (especially, tuberculosis and AIDS) and their immediate relatives in managing their 'bad news' (Maynard, 1997). The study is done within the framework of indirectness (Searle, 1974; Obeng, 1994) and ethnography of speaking/communication (Hymes, 1962; Saville-Troike, 1982). The paper argues that the discourse participants' ability to tell their stories to those who they believe are either the source of their predicament or share in their pain and/or care about them, provides an important therapeutic function. In particular, the discourse enables the participants to cope with their tragedy, adapt to their present circumstances, or undergo often painful and expensive healing procedures. The paper argues further that the discourseparticipants may or may not be in a ratified state of talk with one another and so the discursive strategies employed may involve either directness or indirectness (through soliloquy or pseudo-soliloquy). The linguistic strategies identified include use of pronoun mismatching (where a pronoun indexes a referent other than the one it is traditionally associated with), verbs denoting physical sensation, and pseudonyms with implicit references. The pragmatic strategies employed include implicatures and such genre types as songs, circumlocutions, proverbs, etiological tales, and idioms that turn to veil their accusers and thus offer communicative immunity. It is further argued that the above linguistic and pragmatic strategies have strong implications for dealing with emotional valency.