Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

142 Forbidden Words
chairman, supervisor to foreman, etc. Obviously, the -man locutions are not
dysphemistic when used of a male denotatum, and the neutral locution is
primarily intended to name the office (job) itself, so as to acknowledge that
women may hold such an office. It might be thought that terms suffixed -ess,
and others such as lady/woman doctor, should be acceptable to a female
referent; but it is widely perceived that women referred to using such terms
are less highly valued than their male counterparts, therefore the terms are
dysphemistic and the neutral alternatives are preferred for a female referent.
There is a lot of experimental evidence that generic masculines (as in As for
the man in the street, he is rarely a spokesman for anybody or Every
schoolchild should do his homework regularly if he wants to do well in life)
do in fact favour male reference and male images over females – both for
male and female language users; this bias disappears when gender neutral
terms are used. Unbiased generics also improve females’ recall of texts they
have read. 42 It is worth mentioning that individuals differ greatly in their
attitudes to the terms listed as dysphemistic; a number of women are quite
happy to be Madam Chairman, because they understand the word chairman
as an idiom denoting the office of chairperson: on this view it should no more
be decomposed into ‘chair’ and ‘man’ than either of moonshine meaning
‘illegal liquor’, or fathead meaning ‘idiot, fool’, should be decomposed into a
semantically transparent pair of morphemes.
It is recommended in guides to non-sexist usage that address forms for
women should be comparable with the address forms for men used in the
same context. In the absence of knowing anything about the particular
preferences of the individuals concerned, introducing a couple as e.g. Dr
and Mrs John Dolittle might not cause offence to the lady thus named, but
there is a growing number of women who have no wish to be named as if they
are an appendage to their husband – which is one of the motivations for
women not adopting their husband’s surname. Moreover, John Dolittle’s wife
might well be due the title Dr herself; 43 we know of several occasions when
offence has been caused by an insensitive introduction of this nature. Even
worse, of course, are occasions where the superior title due to a wife or other
female companion is wrongly transferred to her male partner because of
entrenched expectations of differing relative achievements of men and
women. Because a new convention is slowly replacing the old one, the
speaker (particularly the male speaker) needs to be wary.
Taboos in naming and addressing
A personal name is an inalienable part of one’s identity; it is the essence of
self and it is a means by which one is known to one’s fellows. Prisoners are
often required to self-refer using a number, as a means of dehumanizing and