Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

The language of political correctness 103
Figure 4.1. Darkie Toothpaste becomes Darlie Toothpaste.
of similar incidents are recounted. And in a reaction to this piece, George
from CARM describes how he also avoids the term reneged and reneger –‘I
have noticed myself using a different way to convey my message when I am
around black people’. In his variety of English, the verb renege ‘deny,
renounce’ is pronounced /rI"nIg/.
In May 2002, the London Telegraph reported that a British government
minister had been severely criticized for his use of the phrase nitty-gritty at a
police conference because of its supposed racist overtones. He had told his
audience that it was high time to ‘get down to the nitty-gritty’ in training
officers. It was reported that in the modern British police service, the expression
‘nitty-gritty’ is prohibited because it is thought to have originally been
used in reference to those in the lowest reaches of slave ships. This etymology
appears to be spurious. We can find nothing to link this word nitty-gritty with
the early slave trade.
Two other expressions on the police hit list of dirty words were egg and
spoon and a good egg. Now, the police are in fact correct in their history of
egg and spoon. Along with harvest moon and silvery spoon, it was originally
nineteenth-century Cockney rhyming slang for coon. Its use has always been
racist. It would seem from the report that this expression must have also