Here the euphemism runs the other direction. Most chickens hide an ugly thing behind a soft word. “Content” hides everything behind a word that means nothing in particular. A poem is content. A surveillance video is content. A child’s drawing and a pharmaceutical ad are, to the pipe they travel through, the same substance.

The word exists because the pipe needed a name for what it carries that did not require it to care. And it worked: people who used to be writers and photographers now describe themselves, without irony, as content creators, which is the job title of the pipe.

Mamet’s essay is about words that are chosen to avoid confronting something. “Content” avoids confronting the thing itself. It is a word that says: whatever this is, it is going in the slot, and the slot does not need to know.