Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Linguistic purism and verbal hygiene 115
of a language, the label is oxymoronic. For many people, Standard English is
English. What they think of as the rules of English grammar are the rules of
this one variety. There is a perception that words are not ‘real words’ until
they appear in a dictionary. Speakers will, illogically, often ask linguists
whether something they have heard, or even used themselves, is really a word
or not. For the public, wide usage is not enough for a language expression to
meet the standard. As Hans von Jagemann put it in his presidential address to
the Modern Language Association, dictionary makers and grammarians are
believed to build the language.
There is no standard spoken English: people reading speeches in parliament
or scripts in broadcasts use Standard English in the written text, but the spoken
delivery uses many accents. Once the most favoured accent was spoken at
(the Royal) Court; then, it was the speech of the well-educated upper class
(‘received pronunciation’), the model for BBC English. Elsewhere in the world
there were different accepted spoken varieties, such as General American.
Although there are a few regional variations in written Standard English,
regional variation in spoken English is extensive and far more obvious.
The earliest English grammars of the eighteenth century were negatively
prescriptive, and the effects have persisted. The grammarians were ‘mainly
clergymen, retired gentlemen, and amateur philosophers’. 14 One wrote for the
‘Female Teacher in the British Dominions’, 15 some wrote for the improvement
of persons in trade or manufacturing; but ‘the majority of writers seems
to have felt that they were writing for the edification and use of gentlemen, to
warn them against inadvertent contamination with the language of the
vulgar’. 16 The prevailing attitude of the eighteenth century was put forward
by Jonathan Swift, in A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining
the English tongue:
I do here, in the Name of all the Learned and polite Persons of the Nation, complain . . .
that our Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no means
in proportion to its daily Corruptions, that the Pretenders to polish and refine it, have
chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities, and that in many instances, it offends
against every part of Grammar. (Swift 1712: 8)
Forty years later, Dr Samuel Johnson wrote in the Preface to his Dictionary:‘I
found our speech copious without order, and energetic without rules.’ 17 These
views led to an outflow of prescription for what was proper in English.
Acrimony was common because what was correct to one writer was incorrect
to another; and much of the argument was concerned with what should
properly be regarded as stylistic variations. Lip service was paid to the norm
of everyday usage; but it was generally ignored or transmuted to mean the
usage of a select few, namely, the individual scholar and, at best, his circle
(they were all men). As with any act of censoring, these eighteenth-century