Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Taboo, naming and addressing 141
Where the speaker should conventionally defer to the hearer-or-named
because there is considerable social distance between them, or because of
the latter’s superior status, it is dysphemistic for the speaker to employ the
naming or addressing forms from a lower style than convention warrants;
such behaviour will affront the hearer-or-named’s positive face – the person’s
wish, that s/he and things dear to him/her, be valued by others. And it is not
only the person of superior status who can be affronted in this way: if the
leering middle-aged male manager addresses a young female office worker as
sweetheart, she might well object that the social distance between them
requires at least the casual level of formality, and so find this intimate style
offensive. Today, this particular affront would often be classed as ‘sexist’,
which is not necessarily strictly accurate: it is the inappropriate intimate
style which is the basic source of the problem here. (We won’t guarantee
that this nicety would sway the court if the office worker brought a sexual
harassment charge against her manager.)
The last example is interesting: one might imagine that if the speaker is
superior in status to the hearer-or-named and chooses nevertheless to adopt a
casual or intimate style, then the hearer-or-named should be flattered – that is,
experience positive face enhancement. However, in practice this is the result
only when the superior’s behaviour is welcome. It will be recalled from
Chapter 2 that face is grounded in a person’s wants; and, despite there being
conventional beliefs about what a person might be expected to want, ultimately
a person’s wants are idiosyncratic. There are people (of no matter what status
and social distance from oneself) whom one is pleased to (be seen to) come
close to, and to have that closeness marked by the use of casual or intimate
style; and there are other people whom one wishes to maintain a social distance
from, a distance that is demonstrable through linguistic marking.
Throughout this book, we have sought to maintain gender-neutral language;
for example, referring to the speaker and hearer as s/he and him/her,
and the like. While this probably offends some among our readership, we
believe it should offend the smallest number of people overall; consequently,
it is nowadays our own preferred habit. In the late 1960s, the feminist
movement began to make itself heard, objecting to a community attitude that
downgraded women by comparison with men. People in the movement
perceived this depreciating attitude to be reflected in language, and sought
to change at least public language so that it should become less dysphemistic
to women. They held, and continue to hold, the view that revising habits of
language use will change community attitudes. Since the 1970s, a large
number of guidelines for non-sexist language usage in private and public
institutions, government offices, etc. have been issued. 41 Speakers and writers
are advised to choose a gender neutral alternative to the generic use of man
when referring to human beings in general, to prefer chair or chairperson to