Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Sex and bodily effluvia 173
Language for the taboos on sex and bodily effluvia
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement . . .
(Yeats 1965, Crazy Jane talks with the Bishop, lines 15f)
The birth canal from which we emerge lies between the uretha and the
rectum; hence, as St Augustine wrote, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur.
Perhaps this helps to account for the importance we attach to SMD organs
and the bodily effluvia that issue from them.
We have reviewed some of the language of sex, gender, sexuality, sexual
pleasure and sexual reproduction. We did not try to cover the whole field;
almost completely missing is contraception, as well as discussion of humankind’s
oldest profession, female prostitution. Censorship, embodied in legislation,
constrains not only sexual behaviour but the language for talking about
such behaviour.
Human bodies need to expel the by-products of a living organism; and
although we no longer worry that such effluvia will be used to perform black
magic on us, they are normally obnoxious to the public – which makes them a
potential source of embarrassment to the person from whom they issue. Failure
to satisfy community expectations provokes malediction and verbal insult, often
created from terms that name faeces and, to a lesser extent, urine (perhaps
because faeces is solid, more resistant to dispersal and smells more strongly).
Spunk is most unusual in being both a kind of effluvium and a term of praise,
applicable to both genders. Because of its sexual specificity and significance to
reproduction, menstruation is treated differently from defecation and urination –
which no creature can avoid. Although menstrual blood is more strongly
tabooed than either faeces or urine, it is scarcely used in insult or malediction,
although the epithets bloody/bleeding possibly receive some boost from the
fact. 89 All three effluvia give rise to many X-phemisms based on perceptions of,
and conceptions about, their denotata (i.e. about faeces, urine, menstrual blood).
Children and animals do not find bodily effluvia odious; the repulsion to them as
‘dirty’ is something learned in the course of toilet training and the like. It is at
first paradoxical that bodily effluvia have been used as restorative and curative
agents in many, perhaps all, human groups. However, there may be two rational
explanations: one is a continuing belief in homoeopathy; the other is that, as
compost and manure aid the growth of plants, and because the human is born of
a womb whose mysterious functions were marked by menstrual fluid that
enabled it to be (wrongly) likened to a compost heap, bodily effluvia must have
properties to enhance health and growth in humans.
The importance of language play among human beings has been generally
ignored, although see Crystal (1998), Allan and Burridge (1991). We have