Euphemisms and reticence in Italian in the “menstrual discourse”: examining a corpus of pad commercials and articles taken from online women’s magazines

 Menstruation is part of every woman’s life, yet it appears to be still a strong taboo. In order to prove or disprove this assumption, I examined two corpora of commercials and articles, aiming to point out the expected use and abuse of the linguistics strategies of euphemism and reticence. The categorization set by Nora Galli de’ Paratesi (Galli De’ Paratesi, N., 1973. Le Brutte Parole, Torino: Giappichelli) has been followed. Here we refer to “euphemism” as the mechanisms of substitution realized by a speaker when feeling a social pressure or interdiction about the subject. “Reticence” is the mechanism of total suppression of the shaming object from the discourse, without any attempt to substitute the referring term. I examined two corpora. The first one is composed by articles from online women’s magazines. The second corpus is composed by 20 italian (Lines, Nuvenia) commercials of sanitary pads. As results, although the abundance of euphemisms in the italian female magazines is undisputable, the main strategy used by the considered media is reticence. Therefore, these outcomes show little interest in the argument, and a big effort in hiding the menstrual object when present. Furthermore, the mechanisms of euphemistic substitution observed in the corpora are very limited and constant, meaning that the strategies of mitigation are not properly exploited, since the use of deictics expressing distance and the scientific verbiage dominate the context.