Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

108 Forbidden Words
A recent British report provides qualitative and quantitative evidence for
the linguistic fall-out from the new taboos. 46 Research carried out jointly by
the Advertising Standards Authority, the British Broadcasting Corporation,
the Broadcasting Standards Commission and the Independent Television
Commission tested people’s attitudes to swearing and offensive language.
In the first part of the study, participants were asked to respond to the
perceived ‘strength’ of swear words with no context suggested. Though
there were gender and age biases, participants were clear about the relative
severity of these twenty-eight words. Least offensive was verbal play, such
as ‘baby-talk’ poo and bum or rhyming slang like berk (which almost no one
links to cunt). 47 Ranked slightly more offensive were such profanities as
God and Jesus Christ, followed by SMD expressions: expletives such as shit
and fucking hell and sexual references such as shag and pussy. Towards the
top of the scale of severity was derogatory language towards minority
groups, including people with disabilities, those from different religious
faiths, homosexual men and women, and ethnic minorities. Most severe of
all was racial abuse. Evaluating the same twenty-eight swear words in the
context of television programming more than 50% of respondents rated slurs
such as nigger, paki, spastic and Jew with cunt and motherfucker as inappropriate
for transmission at any time. Nigger was at the top of the
severity scale at 53%; by comparison, only 38% felt fuck should never be
broadcast. Interestingly, a number of people felt cunt, motherfucker and fuck
could be broadcast after 11.00pm (28%, 30% and 36% respectively,) but the
figures were considerably smaller for words such as Jew (15%), nigger
(14%), paki (13%) and spastic (12%). Changed rankings on the severity
scale demonstrate a developing tendency already seen in a similar study,
carried out two years earlier.
The evolving nature of taboo is also revealed in changes to lexicographical
conventions. While dictionaries used to include religious and racial swear
words but omit sexually obscene words, the late twentieth century saw
mounting pressure on editors to alter, or even omit altogether, political and
racial definitions of words. Robert Burchfield recounts the fierce debates in
the early 1970s, while he was editor of the OED, over the inclusion in the
dictionary of opprobrious senses of the word Jew. 48 In 1997, there was a
dispute between the publishers of the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary
(tenth edition) and members of the African American community over the
definition of nigger. The dictionary had indicated the offensive connotations
of the term but only after the initial definition of nigger as ‘black person’.
Those disputing the definition wanted the word listed primarily as a ‘slur’,
with the derogatory sense as part of the principal denotation. 49 In response to
these sorts of pressures, some dictionary makers have been much more
regulative in their policy. The practice in the most recent edition of the