Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Disease, death and killing 219
who believe that AIDS is an affliction on the sinful. Evidence is that we are a
long way from coming to terms with the disease. The prohibitions and social
taboos surrounding AIDS remain severe. As the quotation given at the start of
this section reveals, discrimination continues against individuals with AIDS,
those thought to have it, and even their care-givers. There is evidence that the
word AIDS is extending to metaphorical use, in much the same way leprosy
did. An environmentally conscious population labels the phenomenon of land
degradation in Australia (specifically, the erosion of top-soil and salination
caused by irrigation after deforestation) as AIDS of the earth; the same
metaphor is used in America. AIDS deaths are still not typically reported as
such in obituaries and memorial services. Sometimes, the cause of death is not
given, or – because HIV allows opportunistic infections such as pneumonia or
tuberculosis to attack the defenceless immune system – these sorts of illnesses
are listed. Such AIDS-related conditions (ARCs) provide the self-censoring
speaker with a verbal escape hatch.
It is telling that even in AIDSpeak, AIDS continues to appear in upper case.
Once they’ve been around for a while, acronyms normally lose their dots and
capital letters and enter the language as ordinary words, for example, laser
and snafu. Certainly, the dots were dropped when AIDS became the accepted
name for this disease. Yet it is not well enough accepted to become lowercase
aids (like the French translation equivalent sida). British English has
gone some way to abandoning the acronym origins, but there is still a
preciousness in the naming – Aids retains an initial capital, something that
is not usual for disease names. The label for the virus responsible for the
disease HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) is an alphabetism (not an
acronym), so unlikely to become an ordinary word. Yet the fact that people
commonly refer to the ‘HIV virus’ shows that its origins have been obscured
(compare ATM machine ‘automatic teller machine machine’ and PIN number
‘personal identification number number’).
Cancer
I heard the word cancer, and I didn’t hear another word the doctor said to me.
(Patient interviewed in ‘Breaking the News’, Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s
The Health Report, 22 January 1990)
The figures for cancer in the western world are startling. It seems that around
a third of the population will develop some form of cancer in their life-time.
And while the medical profession recognizes something like two hundred
different varieties of cancerous diseases, each with their own biology, to
the lay person the word cancer is treated as if it were a single condition.
The taboos surrounding it are considerable. In obituaries and death notices,