Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

216 Forbidden Words
define sick as ‘affected by any disorder of health’, but in slang usage the word
has already narrowed to ‘mental ill health, frequently with overtones of
perversion’ (compare sicko and American sicknik). The names for establishments
holding mental patients show the same pejoration. Latin asylum originally
meant ‘place of refuge, retreat’; it originally required a qualifier, such
as insane/lunatic asylum. The ordinary understanding of asylum (referring to
a building) is now specifically ‘institution for the care of the insane’.
The nature of our more colloquial expressions is also telling. Crazy (and
hence crazed and cracked) originally meant ‘flawed, damaged’ (cf. crazy
paving). It was applicable to all manner of illness, but has also narrowed to
‘mental illness’. The stereotypical mental patient as someone ‘flawed, deficient’
(compare mentally deficient) is the basis for many other dysphemistic
expressions for madness: crack-brained, scatter-brained, shatter-brained;
head-case; falling to pieces; unhinged; having a screw/tile/slate loose; kangaroos
in the top paddock; one brick short of a load; not playing with a full
deck; three cards short of a full deck; one sandwich short of a picnic; two cans
short of a six-pack; two bob short of a quid; not the full quid; a shingle short;
a shrub short of a herbaceous border; and perhaps he’s lost his marbles. This
kind of dysphemistic formula appears in a number of languages.
It has required a considerable rejigging of our thinking to persuade us to
accept mental illness as an illness like any other – as one with patients able to
be treated and cured. Western society no longer believes in a demonological
concept of mental illness; yet our linguistic behaviour towards the mentally
afflicted reveals attitudes that are still firmly tied to old-fashioned notions of
behavioural deviance. The strength of the stigma is also evident in the
proliferation of maledictions invoking mental abnormality; for example,
retard, moron, jerk, spas(tic), cretin and imbecile. While it is acceptable to
be physically ill, it is much less acceptable to be mentally ill.
AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome)
44 He is a leprous man, he is unclean: the priest shall pronounce him utterly unclean;
his plague is in his head. 45 And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be
rent, and his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and shall cry,
Unclean, unclean. 46 All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be
defiled; he is unclean: he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his habitation be.
(Leviticus 13: 44–6)
I wish I had cancer instead of AIDS. I could stand the treatments and the pain and my
hair falling out. And I’m going to die anyway. But then, at least, my family wouldn’t
reject me. I could go home. (A young female, quoted in Fisher 1995: 92)
When AIDS first appeared, the social and linguistic parallels with diseases
like leprosy and syphilis were striking. It seemed to have arrived out of the