“Semantic Chickens” is a short essay in Writing in Restaurants, published in 1986. Its subject is the words we choose so that we do not have to look at what we are doing. Mamet’s example was the Department of War, which became the Department of Defense and stopped having to answer the question its own name used to ask.

The essay’s claim is small and hard: the euphemism does not hide the thing. The thing goes on exactly as before. What the euphemism hides is us, from the thing — and a person who cannot see what he is doing will keep doing it.

Why chickens

The chickens are the ones that come home to roost. A euphemism is a loan taken out against the day the plain word must be paid. The loans are always called in. This site keeps the ledger in the meantime.

The rules of entry

An entry needs three things. A euphemism in actual use — nothing invented, nothing hypothetical. The plain word it replaced, in as few syllables as the truth permits. And a note on who the substitution protects, because every euphemism has a client, and the client is never the reader.

Corrections are welcome; this is, after all, a dictionary of corrections. A candidate qualifies when saying the plain word aloud, in the room where the euphemism is preferred, would cost somebody something. That cost is the entire subject of this site.

A note on the first entry

Mamet’s Department of Defense example has aged in an interesting way. In 2025 the department was authorized to use “Department of War” again as a secondary title. Whether that is a return to plain words or just a different performance is exactly the kind of question this site exists to sit with.