Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Food and smell 201
The longer the word has been in the language, the more disagreeable the
denotation. Stink and stench have been around the longest. The most fragrant
terms listed are French – odour, scent, perfume, fragrance and aroma.
French and Latin have long been sources for English euphemisms. Yet,
the deodorizing property of the sweet-smelling euphemism inevitably fades
as the taboo sense asserts itself. Odour, as the oldest of these five, has
already festered.
Forbidden fruit
This chapter has been concerned with the language of food and drink,
especially the culinary delicacies and abominations of modern times. Avoidance
strategies take the form of gastronomic red herrings – language that
disguises, distorts, deceives, misleads, inflates and obfuscates. Current nutritional
superstitions and gastronomic fetishes condemn salt, fat, sugar,
caffeine, butter and margarine. Food labels and advertisements send out
‘healthy’ messages, with descriptions such as fat-free, salt-free, sugar-free,
meat-free, guilt-free, and so forth. One lite product advertised itself with
‘Nothing added’. Even the king-size nomenclature, so popular in food labels
generally, has now been dropped from chocolate bars in an effort to promote
healthy eating and combat obesity (and its trendy offspring macbesity, globesity
and diabesity).
Food has an intimate association with our bodies. Eating and drinking bind
us within a community and differentiate us from others. Eating habits and
dietary regimens are deeply entwined with cultural traditions, connecting with
things religious, moral, medical and sexual. Food and drink taboos are
identity tags for group membership; using Brillat-Savarin’s aphorism, ‘Tell
me what you eat: I will tell you what you are.’ 54 The food consumed by one
group is despised by another, so that ethnic and racial slurs can play on
gastronomy; and they are increasingly common.
The most robust taboo of all is that people should not be turned into food.
Somewhat surprising therefore is the dearth of euphemistic expressions for
cannibalism. Perhaps the idea of people as food is so repugnant as to be barely
mentionable – even if a common response to tension is nail-biting and finger
chewing. Metaphorical cannibalism flourishes where the language of food
and the language of sex meet. Expressions such as I could eat you! capture the
similarities between our eating habits and sexual behaviour. This link is
exploited in the food metaphors used to describe sexual body parts and
associated activities. The image of an edible lover can be found in language
as diverse as the poetic diction of elevated literature, through to the amateurish
efforts of those who post their St Valentine’s Day messages in a local