‘Compulsive Euphemism’ by Joseph S. Salemi

From A Gallery of Ethopaths

Ethopaths fear, as much as cancer,
A straight, unvarnished, simple answer.
They love the euphemistic chatter
That clouds up an essential matter.
Seeing things clearly and addressing
Their substance with no elaborate dressing
Strikes ethopaths as plain immoral.
They’d rather take a dose of chloral
Than state the facts in simple fashion.
In fact, they have an ingrained passion
For phrasing that obscures and covers,
And this is why their language suffers:
Circumlocution leads to blunder
That tears one’s sound and sense asunder,
Or else makes speech as gauche and clunky
As that of a State Department flunky.
They talk of the undeveloped nations
When they mean wastes and desolations;
Putting taxpayers through the screws
Is called enhancing revenues;
They speak of an out-of-wedlock child
When bastard is how he should be styled.
They’ll term the stride of Stephen Hawking
As muscularly challenged walking—
A euphemism most elastic:
Back in the past he was a spastic.
Having a cigarette and whiskey
Is substance abuse, and far too risky
To merit much more than stern rebuke.
Such prissiness can make one puke.
Sometimes they dress up outright lies
In an upscale and chic disguise
Meaning, when they say World Opinion,
The New York Times and its smug minyan
Of inbred editorial hacks
And pompous governmental flacks.
They clamor for language that’s inclusive
When they mean censorship’s intrusive
Finger in how you choose each pronoun.
It’s hard to obtain the simple low-down
On just what an ethopath is saying.
His words are a kind of crypto-praying
Where discourse is like a charm or spell
Keeping one safe in a verbal shell
Away from the brutish world of fact,
Unmanageable save by discreet tact.
Besides such gaseous obfuscation
Ethopaths turn all conversation
Into a surreptitious pleading
For things that they think the world is needing.
Statements by ethopathic vermin
Always contain a coded sermon
Telling one how one ought to think.
Language for them is just a link
In their relentless urge to lecture,
And you can tell the verbal texture
Of every ethopathic speech—
They all advise, prescribe, and preach.
Old Petrarch said the eyes revealed
That which the soul would keep concealed.
With ethopaths, it’s the wagging tongue
That shows the stuff from which they’re spun.

Joseph S. Salemi has published five books of poetry, and his poems, translations and scholarly articles have appeared in over one hundred publications world-wide.  He is the editor of the literary magazine Trinacria and writes for Expansive Poetry On-line. He teaches in the Department of Humanities at New York University and in the Department of Classical Languages at Hunter College.