Euphemism!

• a gentleman does not drive insane, drives to distraction...
• shooting one's wall out of pure boredom is not proposterous it's just that pistol practice should be distincly an open-air pastime...
• bullet holes in one's flat walls is not horrible, but rather does not improve the atmosphere nor the appearance of the room...
• and relics are all over the place, they just have a way of wandering into unlikely positions...

An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction. Not that I am in the least conventional in that respect myself. [...] But with me there is a limit, and when I find a man who keeps his cigars in coalshuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin to give myself virtuous airs. I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distincly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humours, would sit in an armchair with his hair-trigger and hundred Boxer cartridges and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room improved by it.

Our chambers were always full of chemicals and of criminal relics which had a way of wandering into unlikely positions, and of turning up in the butter-dish or in even less desirable places.

The Musgrave Ritual, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle