Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

The language of political correctness 109
Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal (‘Dictionary of the Afrikaans language’)
is to simply list racist terms (Kaffir, Franse siekte ‘French disease,
syphilis’, etc.) and label them as ‘racist’, but leave them undefined with no
supporting examples. Sexist terms and lexical items referring to ‘deviations’,
handicaps and stigmatized diseases are explained, labelled and given a ‘sensitive
handling’ in the dictionary’s metalanguage. Readers may be referred to
an orthophemistic synonym, for example, from hoer to prostituut, but there is
no cross-reference from the orthophemism to the offensive synonym. The
Encarta World English Dictionary, which made its appearance in 1999, has
been described by reviewers as ‘extremely sensitive to political correctness’.
50 The dictionary recognizes three degrees of offensiveness: insulting,
offensive and taboo.
[Encarta’s] notes about terms that may be considered rude are the oddest thing about
the new dictionary. They’re PC in the extreme, often censorious and sometimes
missing linguistic shifts that are taking place. It waggles its schoolmarmish finger
even at crone (hardly a word most people employ these days), saying that it ‘deliberately
insults a woman’s age, appearance, and temperament’, but it doesn’t flag that
some feminists have now reclaimed it and use it in a positive sense. Queer gets similar
treatment, but likewise it misses the way it is now used by gays themselves (as for
example, in queercore, the next entry on the page, which wouldn’t exist but for this
shift). Nigger provokes a solemn sermonette: after warning about its offensiveness, it
says ‘Those who persist in using it, should remember that their use of the word reflects
directly upon them, the users’. Every rude word is spattered with ‘offensive term’,
repeated for every compound or derivative, often in the definition as well as the
heading; the entry for fuck, for example, contains the warning 28 times in four column
inches, plus seven instances of ‘taboo offensive’, just in case we don’t get the point.
(Quinion 1999)
Equally revealing of changing taboos is the behaviour of those guardians
of linguistic goodness such as Dr Thomas Bowdler, Mrs Mary Whitehouse
and the imaginary Mrs Grundy (see Chapter 1). In the early nineteenth
century, Bowdler and his sister set out to expurgate Shakespeare. They
produced the so-called ‘Family Shakespeare’ – from which, as he announced
on the title page, ‘those words and expressions are omitted which cannot
with propriety be read aloud in a family’. Bowdlerism, as it came to be
known, targeted profanity and sexual explicitness. There was subsequent
bowdlerizing of a range of works, including the Bible. Perrin presents a
history of expurgated works in both Britain and America, with a chapter on
the targets of contemporary bowdlerism, notably dictionaries and literature
classics. Perrin shows that, though censoring on religious and sexual grounds
has diminished, the increase in racial and ethnic expurgation has been
striking. 51 Earlier, we described a case of bowdlerization of English literary
texts by the New York State Eduction Department, who censored references