Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

116 Forbidden Words
prescriptive practices were tied firmly to the censors’ own personal beliefs
and preferences. It was conduct that nineteenth-century and early
twentieth-century linguistics castigated as unscientific: it gave so-called
‘traditional grammar’ a bad name.
In his Essay on Human Understanding, John Locke 18 argued that to
understand thinking and knowledge, one must understand language as the
means of thought and communication because linguistic forms represent the
ideas of things and not the things themselves. The final chapters of the Essay
deal with the imperfections of language and with avoidable abuses. Locke
claimed that words only mean what they are understood to mean; consequently,
usage must be the sole arbiter. Quintilian was more prestigious than
Locke, and had said much the same sort of thing c.88 CE; for instance, the
following observations were generally approved:
Usage, however, is the surest pilot in speaking, and we should treat language as
currency minted with the public stamp.
[W]e must make up our minds what we mean by usage. If it be defined merely as the
practice of the majority, we shall have a very dangerous rule affecting not merely
style in language but life as well, a far more serious matter. For where is so much
goodtobefoundthatwhatisrightshouldpleasethemajority?...Iwilltherefore
define usage in speech as the agreed practice of the educated. (Quintilian 1920–2,
Institutes I.vi.3, 43, 45),
Eighteenth-century grammarians would doubtless claim to be presenting a
‘consensus of the educated’ in their works, but in reality there seems to have
been very little consensus on what constitutes good usage; each grammarian
presented his own judgments, which often disagreed with those of his fellow
grammarians.
Any appeal to good usage ought to describe what is meant by such a
phrase, and the better grammarians did so. For instance, in The Philosophy
of Rhetoric, 19 George Campbell identified it as ‘reputable, national, and
present’. By ‘reputable’, he means the Court and authors of ‘reputation’ –
presumably by consensus of the educated. By ‘national’, he means neither
provincial nor foreign. By ‘present’, he means within the previous century,
though he apparently excludes examples of good usage from living authors.
His canons of good usage include:
unambiguous expression;
regular rather than irregular forms;
simplicity rather than complexity;
euphony;
conformity with Latin or Ancient Greek syntax;
avoiding solecisms (syntactic errors) and barbarisms (phonological
errors). 20