Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

214 Forbidden Words
eighteenth centuries. With an entry fee of one penny, it had revenue of around
£400 per annum in the early eighteenth century – that’s 96,000 visits per
year! 31 There is a long history to the perceived link between madness and
funny behaviour, so that many terms for madness are associated with the
funny; for example, funny (in the head), funny farm, w(h)acky, wacko, mad,
crazy, bats, nuts.
As we have seen, euphemisms thrive when humans fear they are losing
control over their thoughts and actions. Madness is perceived as a lack of
control; hence there are expressions like out of / losing one’s mind. The loss of
control that is a feature of slapstick humour links it with insanity and with
historical treatments of the mad as witless clowns. Loss of control is the
motivation behind many of the different meanings of the terms mad and crazy
in normal non-clinical usage; for example,
I’m going mad/crazy, indicating forgetfulness, confusion, losing one’s grip
on sanity;
I must be mad/crazy, said of undertaking something beyond one’s capabilities,
doing something excessively foolish;
He was mad/crazy, said of someone in frenzied rage;
He was quite mad/crazy, said of someone carried away by excessive
enthusiasm.
All these suggest extravagant actions and emotions which are out of control,
as do many compounds formed on the words mad and crazy: boy-mad, girlcrazy,
music mad/crazy, car mad/crazy, and madman/crazy man; mad dog/
bull, and so on.
Because the behaviour of mental patients does not conform to morally and
socially accepted norms, it is usually viewed as threatening and strange, and is
often believed to result from maliciousness of character, particularly if the
patient somehow ‘looks different’. This perception of mental patients is still
firmly tied to the old-fashioned notion linking internal and external corruption. It
also shows a lingering fear of ‘moral contagion’ – that the madness might
somehow transmit itself to others. 32 The stereotype of the mental patient is
someone who is morally deficient, incurable and potentially dangerous; someone
who is best locked up or put away.Curiously,thewordidiot has the same origin
as words such as idiom and idiosyncratic: all derive from the Greek idios
‘peculiar to oneself, private’. In ancient Greek, an idiotes was a ‘private person’,
so an idiot was perhaps perceived as someone locked up in their own private
world; compare this with current connotations of hermit and recluse. Nevertheless,
for a long time it was thought (and a lot of people still think) that insane
people ought to be locked up by us sane ones. And because of the vagueness of
the term mental illness, even very minor anxious or depressive disorders tend to
carry the same negative stigmata as the severe psychotic cases.