Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Taboo, naming and addressing 133
‘lamb’, Loewe ‘lion’, Reh ‘deer’, Taube ‘dove’ and Wolf were almost all
borne by Jews. Why were many German Jews so keen to abandon the names
which labelled their heritage? Because Jewish names were publicly mocked.
Not only were the name-bearers degraded by this; potential employers found
Jewish names offensive. One female teacher was refused employment because
the headmaster ‘feared that the surname Itzig [a name subject to particular
derision and abuse] could be exploited as a nickname by the children’ and all
hell would break loose in the school. 25 Thus, a name potentially provokes a
very negative attitude toward the name-bearer based on racist (ethnicist)
stereotyping of character, religion, morality, etc. by out-groupers. Less
noticeably, it will evoke positive attitudes from in-groupers from the same
onomastic community.
Styles of naming and addressing
Appropriate addressing or naming of someone depends on the role the
speaker perceives the person addressed or named – henceforth ‘hearer-ornamed’
– to have adopted relative to the speaker in the situation of utterance.
26 This role may change in different situations. For instance, Freddie and
Eddie might be on first-name terms while having lunch together before a
board meeting; but when conducting official business in the boardroom,
where Freddie is Chairman of the Board, Eddie will probably address Freddie
as Mr Chairman and name him the chairman in accordance with his role.
However, in an unofficial aside Eddie can quite properly revert to using
Freddie, even in the boardroom. It is not the physical situation of the speaker
and the hearer-or-named that is relevant, but the hearer-or-named’s perceived
role relative to the speaker within that situation. High social status is not a
right, but a prerequisite of those who can either make or persuade other people
to recognize such status.
The relative status of the speaker and the hearer-or-named derives from two
sources: their relative power, and the social distance between them. The relative
power of the speaker and the hearer-or-named is defined by social factors which
obtain in the situation of utterance. As we said in Chapter 2, the relative power of
a physician and a highway patrolman is not given for every occasion, it depends
on how they encounter one another: whether the highway patrolman is requiring
a medical consultation at the doctor’s office, or the doctor has been stopped on
the highway for alleged dangerous driving. The social distance between the
speaker and the hearer-or-named is determined by such parameters as their
comparative ages, genders and socio-cultural backgrounds. The management
of social status – of power and social distance relations – involves the management
of face, and consequently the management of language choice. Hence the
style and variety of language that the speaker uses will depend on two things: