Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Disease, death and killing 207
common names were the malady of France, French pox, French disease,
French aches, French fever, French malady, French gout and French marbles
(( French morbilles ‘small blisters’). Captain Cook was dismayed to discover
that the Tahitians called the disease Apa no Britannia ‘the British
disease’ because he believed it was introduced by the French. 4 The buboes
associated with the disease were known as French pigs; those struck by
syphilis were Frenchified, and someone whose nose had been destroyed by
the disease was knocked with a French faggot. If we look beyond English, we
see the same practice, each country attributing blame elsewhere. The Italians
charged the French, and called the epidemic mal francese or morbus gallicus.
The French retaliated, calling it mal de Naples. The Germans also blamed it
on the French – as we see from the Gruenpeck quote above. To the Dutch,
it was spaensche pokken ‘Spanish pox’. The Russians blamed it on the Poles,
who in turn called it the German disease. In Turkey, it was known as the
Christian disease, and in India and Japan, the Portuguese disease. The
Portuguese called it the Castilian disease. There is a parallel today with
AIDS: while those in the western world usually locate its origins in Africa,
many in Africa attribute it to the west, most notably to the United States. 5 The
history of names for nasty diseases offers interesting diachronic evidence for
contemporary political antagonisms: the common dysphemistic practice
among human groups is to blame an enemy for the spread of diseases that
afflict those who engage in vice and immorality.
It was in 1530 that the euphemistic name syphilis first appeared. Syphilis, a
shepherd suffering from the disease, was the main protagonist in the poem
Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus. The author, Girolamo Fracastoro of Verona,
was a doctor who also wrote a treatise on syphilis. These days, it is difficult to
appreciate the euphemistic qualities of the label – all pleasing pastoral
associations have disappeared. Even doctors now avoid using the word
syphilis with their patients, resorting instead to labels like treponemal disease,
luetic disease (from Latin lues ‘contagion, plague’), spirochaetal disease and
even the general-for-specific euphemism special disease. The linguistic taboo
is still strong. Despite the fact that most of the mystery of cause and cure is
now gone, social diseases like syphilis are scarcely more freely named today:
general-for-specific abbreviations like STD and VD, or colloquial labels such
as cupid’s measles (compare venereal [Venus’] disease) are preferred. 6
Another example of disease seen as punishment is leprosy. Curiously, there
were few euphemisms for it, or few that have survived. Most of the earlier
labels were descriptive, such as leper and leprous. They first appeared in the
language some time during the 1200s; they came via French but derive
ultimately from the Greek lepra ‘scaly’, describing the scale-like lesions
symptomatic of the disease. In the 1300s, the terms lazar ‘leper’ and lazarous
‘leprous’ were also common. These were based on the name of the beggar