Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Disease, death and killing 215
The result of all this is a stigmatized illness, with a long chain of euphemistic
labels as impressive as any that might have existed in the middle ages.
Society’s prejudiced perceptions continue to bubble away, undermining the
euphemistic value. The negative connotations reattach themselves and a new
euphemism must be found. The word demented goes back to the Latin mens
‘mind’ and de ‘out of’; compare expressions such as out of one’s mind, out of
one’s head, out of one’s skull and even out of one’s tree. None of these terms
is polite. Imbecile is now a strong term of abuse – it derived from the Latin
word imbecillus (from bacillum ‘small staff’) and meant literally ‘without a
stick’; in other words, a mind ‘unsupported and feeble’. 33 The word insanity
derives from Latin in-sanus ‘not-healthy’. It is now confined to ‘mentally
unsound’ but originally had a much broader domain, encompassing all bodily
organs and their functions. Today, even the word sane (without the negative
prefix) has narrowed under the influence of insane to denote only a mental
condition. (Compare sanitorium, a place for the treatment of invalids and
convalescents.) Lunatic originally referred to a certain type of madness
believed to be caused by the changing phases of the moon (after the Roman
goddess of the moon, Luna). But the euphemistic motivation is no longer
apparent; the word has now become pejorative, as are its shortened versions
loon and loony. Describing someone as touched suggests intervention by the
hand of God. The innocence of the holy simpleton or the holy fool was divine
and something that set these people above ordinary human beings. There is a
similar motivation behind the Swiss French euphemism chrétin ‘Christian’
for the people whose combination of physical deformity and mental retardation
(cretinism) was endemic in some valleys of Switzerland during the
Renaissance period. Chrétin was the source for the English dysphemism
cretin.
The history of the word deranged illustrates a typical path of development.
Originally from a verb meaning ‘to disturb, disarrange’, it could be qualified
with the modifier mentally to be used of people who were ‘disturbed in the
mind’. But the context of mental illness contaminated the word and now,
without the modifier, it has narrowed to the ‘mad’ sense alone. Even the
adjective mental has been affected. Dictionaries still list ‘pertaining to the
mind’ as its central sense, but ‘denoting a disorder of the mind’ is always
given as a secondary meaning, as are colloquial senses ‘mad’ and ‘foolish’.
Compare also be/go mental and become a mental patient. It may well be that
disordered and afflicted are moving in the same direction – disturbed has
already arrived. Though still requiring a modifier like mentally to refer
specifically to psychiatric illness, this is now becoming their normal context
of use. Similarly, the general-for-specific euphemism sick is frequently used
to describe someone who is mentally challenged or in other words of an
unsound mental condition (two more euphemisms). Dictionaries continue to