Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Disease, death and killing 223
anything should happen to me, which demonstrates a very persistent euphemism.
Taken literally, the condition in this idiom cannot fail to be true: there
can be no doubt that something will happen to the speaker, so such a blatant
statement of the obvious implicates the ultimate event: death. There is no ‘if’
about death, the only uncertainty is when it will happen. This persistent
euphemism not only avoids mentioning death, it seemingly pretends that
death is uncertain.
Death has become the great taboo subject, smothered in prudery. 45 There is
a parallel between the repression of sex, which brought with it a thriving
industry in pornography during the Victorian times, and today’s taboo on
death, which exists alongside the depiction of murder and violent death in
fiction and fantasy in print, comic books, and on screen – from Dr Who to Kill
Bill. News stories featuring violent death are just as ubiquitous. (The difference
is that Victorian pornography was – at least supposedly – underground,
whereas today’s depictions of death are publicly acknowledged and often
publicly celebrated.) With extraordinary irrationality, some citizens who
admitted to allowing their children watch violent death on television petitioned
against the building of a church wall which would store the ashes of its
congregation, on the grounds that it would be harmful to their children as they
walked by. 46 This censorious behaviour contrasts with the Middle Ages,
where everyday life was full of symbols to constantly remind people of death;
the Ancient Egyptians often placed a miniature mummy on the meal table for
a similar reason. Today, this seems macabre. The open acknowledgement of
grief and mourning during a wake may still occur, but public carousing at or
after the funeral is unusual and silent stoic endurance is considered the proper
way of grieving. Private ceremonies, like public ceremonies in memory of the
war dead or of assassinated public heroes (like US President John F. Kennedy,
the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, pop star John Lennon, and the untimely
death of Diana, Princess of Wales in a car crash) often celebrate the life of the
deceased.
People in the Middle Ages confronted their own mortality in a way that
now seems quite appalling to us. We catch vicarious glimpses of it from
documentaries of human tragedies that result from natural disasters like
famine and man-made ones like war and terrorism; yet the majority of people
in our society are removed from immediate interaction with death. Life
expectancy has increased enormously, infant mortality has dropped to very
low levels, and there do not exist anywhere near the same number of lifethreatening
diseases to confront. We are insulated from death by hospitals and
other institutions which care for the sick and dying; and there is a funeral
industry to dispose of the dead. Many people reach adulthood without ever
having laid eyes on a real corpse, except on film or video. And – in striking
contrast with the medieval fascination with corrupting corpses – we now rely