Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Taboo, naming and addressing 135
sayidin panoto gomo kalifatullah kaping X, which translates along the
following lines: ‘His Exalted Majesty, whose Honour Shines Bright, Sultan
of all the world, Commander in Chief, Servant of God, Protector of Religion,
Assistant to God, the tenth.’ Some of the accolades to the Emperor of Lilliput
and to the Sultan of Yogyakarta are blatantly false; for example, the latter is not
truthfully ‘Sultan of all the world’. It is the connotations of courtesy and honour
that are important.
Where the speaker is inferior to the hearer-or-named, s/he will use unreciprocated
(or conventionally unreciprocable) deferential forms such as Your/her
Majesty, Your/his Highness, Your Lordship, Mr President, Madam Chair, etc.,
all of which are frozen or formal style. 27 These titles do not include names,
but identify roles or social positions; so, to some extent, they impersonalize.
So do terms like Sir, Madam, this lady, the gentleman, etc. which may be
formal or consultative (and much less likely, frozen). Children addressing
adults sometimes use the titles Mr or Mrs alone, which is reminiscent of
consultative style. Even within that style, these – but not Miss! – would be
dysphemistic from an adult speaker, although this may not be true for all
dialects. In rather stilted English, the hearer can be addressed in the third
person. We have done it ourselves, as the astute reader (you) will doubtless
have noticed. Occasionally, one encounters similar forms in the more expensive
shops, e.g. If Madam so desires, she could have our tailor alter the
waistband just a touch. Then there is the use of we as an address form,
particularly in questions. This is commonly used to children, Ooh, we’re
not a happy little person, are we? Shall we drink up our milk? and to adults
by those offering a service: How are we today? (doctor to patient), What
would we like to drink? (waitperson to diners).
The impersonalizing manner of naming and addressing that we have just
been discussing might be compared with the regular use in some languages of
third person address forms to the hearer. For example, the deferential Polish
question in (1), using third person, contrasts with the familiar version in (2),
which uses second person and roughly corresponds to the colloquial style 28 of
English:
In the canonical speech situation where the speaker and the hearer are in face
to face conversation, there is a greater psycho-social distance, and often
a greater physical distance, between the speaker and a third person than
between the speaker and the hearer (second person). This difference in
relative distance is captured in the ordinals of the terms first, second and
third persons. Third person is intrinsically more distant from the speaker than