The Stygian Wholesto

Swamp – Wetlands

Medicine – Medication

Theatre – Performing Arts Center

Riot – Civil Disorder

The Dump – The Landfill

Constipation – Occasional Irregularity

Those are only a few of our euphemisms that the late great George Carlin brought to our rarely buoyant attention. George didn’t have heart attack, he had heart complications that resulted in his passing. One headline wrote it that way, so for George, his proof is in the proverbial pudding.

Our restructuring of images is inescapable, which makes George right—we are all diseased. Our linguistic sickness is not analogical despite our growing psychoanalytic and historical curiosity. The proper end of reification encompasses ancient rabbis and church fathers as well as electro-ignitions on the sweeping god-of-media’s frontier. Carlin said, “By and large, language is a tool for concealing truth.” The concealment thickens the more we try to thin. When we approach a text as a locus of fruitful inquiry, we like to primarily dethrone critics, scrutinize the images of women, respond to sexual stereotypes, scoff at fictional characters, and shit, the best we can, all over acts of literary mimesis, mainly, to make someone else smell it, and when that doesn’t work, rub the cultured guano right into the eyes. And this is what we often do, us bibliophiles, us language lovers. My colleagues and I have resisted our concerns with contemporary pedagogy and positioned ourselves within endangered rhetorics of exaggeration, omissions, oblique insertions and unreal orthodoxy. Somewhere in there, we identify with Carlin’s repulsion and antagonism toward the euphemism. The euphemism is not only dead language, but it is the basis for all dehumanized, antiphilosopy of art hostile toward objectivity, realism, truth (both the big T, and little t), politics and the remnants of an industrial society. The euphemism serves as a key moderator between conflations and linguistic corruption, folding the two in on themselves to yield a wolf-in-wolf’s-clothing technique, teeming with propaganda, and covertly ushered into our daily dialects. The euphemism is euthanasia of structural perfection, and lacks any human inclination toward the concrete other. When George said, “Tits always look better in a pink sweater,” he showed us that if we work hard, if we pay close attention to our imaginary activities and comprehensive judgment, we can move beyond our anemic referential and say something clearly. Thank you, George. Talk to you later.