Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

182 Forbidden Words
Norman Conquest in 1066, French was the language used among the upper
classes, and the effect on English was enormous. Between 1250 and 1400,
some 10,000 words were adopted, and roughly 75 per cent of these are still in
use today. The nature of the borrowed items reflects the prestige that the
Norman French enjoyed during this time. Interestingly, dinner and supper are
French, but humble breakfast is Old English. The Normans controlled the
state, the military and cultural and intellectual interests, and French words
flooded into these areas. They imported spices, foreign herbs, plants, even
animals; and they introduced to the English their tastes in food, their culinary
methods – and their expressions for all of these. 18
Antipodeans are dubious about eating something called shark (perhaps it is
because they sometimes eat us); so when shark is intended as food, it is called
in Australian English flake, and in New Zealand English lemon fish. Well,
why not? Apparently, no one would eat tuna either until the name was
changed from horse mackerel – ‘tuna’ tastes better than ‘horse mackerel’, it
seems. Now that mad cow disease or BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy)
has come to light, it will be interesting to see if a new gastronomic red
herring appears for beef – there is no sign of one, even though in the mid
1990s, beef and beef products disappeared from many British menus. In fact,
the risks of contracting the fatal brain disease euphemistically known as CJD
(Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) are lower than they have ever been before; nonetheless,
the squeamishness endures.
Often, linguistic disguises are recruited to conceal unmentionable parts of
the animal. Our late nineteenth-century forbears avoided terms such as leg,
thigh and breast, even when speaking of a cooked fowl, referring instead to its
dark (or red) meat and white meat; terms still heard today. Coy Americans
resorted to the term joint for the leg of a cooked chicken or turkey. The use of
drumstick in this context is an earlier expression (dating from the mid eighteenth
century), and it provided another useful linguistic escape hatch for
speakers. The Victorians had an almost pathological dread of speaking about
anything below the waist; this was a time when frilled pantalettes hid the limbs
of the table and the pianoforte. 19 But modern English speakers should not be
smug. We employ a variety of linguistic manoeuvres to ensure that when
certain animal parts are turned into food, we don’t mention them. Prairie/
mountain oysters refer to calf’s testicles – also referred to as fry. In fact, in
many English dialects fry has become a kind of all-purpose euphemism for any
culinary unmentionable. The label refers to the method of cooking and nicely
sidesteps the issue as to what bits actually appear in the dish. There was once a
noun plucks, which meant literally ‘that which is plucked out’, and covered
liver, heart and lung; in other words, the so-called variety meats or organ meats.
In some English dialects, lamb’s fries are testicles of young sheep; in others
lamb’s fry is liver and lights (‘lungs’). The name effectively disguises the fact