Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Taboo, naming and addressing 127
metaphysical malevolence by counteracting possible blasphemies and profanities
that arouse their terrible wrath:
A mantra [hymn] recited with incorrect intonation and ‘careless’, arrangement of
varna (letters) [reacts] like a thunderbolt and gets the reciter destroyed by God Indra.
(Kachru 1984: 178; sic)
Despite secularization during the twentieth century, there are plenty of constraints
on the names of our god(s) and their acolytes. Ritualized superstition
is revealed in our response of Bless you when someone sneezes (note the
euphemistic omission of God as the actor subject of bless you); the blessing
was to prevent the devil from entering the body momentarily emptied of its
soul by the sneeze. Many people make the old pagan appeal touch wood or
knock on wood to guard against misfortune; some believe in lucky and
unlucky numbers; thespians taboo the name of the Scottish play 7 in the theatre
and do not wish their fellows Good luck! but instead Break a leg! But, you
might say, nobody really believes in these taboos; we are different from all
those ‘primitive’ souls. Are we? They may be just as sceptical in fact:
Once when a band of !Kung Bushmen had performed their rain rituals, a small cloud
appeared on the horizon, grew and darkened. Then rain fell. But the anthropologists
who asked if the Bushmen reckoned the rite had produced the rain, were laughed out of
court (Marshall 1957). How naive can we get about the beliefs of others? (Douglas
1966: 73)
Nevertheless, name taboos seem remarkably robust everywhere.
In many societies, names of the dead are (or were until recently) taboo:
People on Misima [Island, Papua New Guinea] have several names, at least three, but
one of these is their ‘real’ name, and this name is strictly tabooed by everyone in the
area when they die (essentially, in their home village which may consist of 200–500
people). The penalty for breaking the taboo is to pay valuables to the offended
relatives. Close relatives in the same clan are allowed to say the name of the
deceased, but seldom do. (Simons 1982: 203)
In some societies (Misima among them), anyone bearing the same name as a
deceased person must use another. In Tiwi (Australia), the ban is even more
severe than this, for it extends even to those personal names which the dead
person may have given to others. 8 Violations of such taboos are believed to
cause misfortune, sickness and death; 9 often they cause offence to living
descendants, too. Although native English-speaking communities do not have
such taboos, there is a host of euphemisms for the topic of death and the
dead. In many societies in which personal names derive from common
words, when the name is taboo, the word – and even phonetically similar
words – are tabooed too. This can mean that nearly 50 per cent of the
vocabulary is potentially taboo for some people. 10 Euphemisms are created