Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Disease, death and killing 231
Figure 9.1. Squatters ‘dispersing’ Australian Aborigines; late nineteenth
century (from A. J. Vagan, The Black Police: A Story of Modern Australia.
London: Hutchinson, 1890).
warfare provides a heaven for hypocrisy; it is a kind of political language
which, as George Orwell said, ‘is designed to make lies sound truthful and
murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’. 62
‘Militarese’ uses euphemisms which are loaded to the point of deception;
perhaps terminate with extreme prejudice and take out [a target] are transparent;
but pacify means ‘be killing (be at war with)’; neutralize and salvage
mean ‘kill selected targets’; mopping up operations include killing off the
remnants of the resistance. In nineteenth-century Australia, disperse was an
officially sanctioned euphemism for Aboriginal killings by the ‘native’ police
force set up in 1848. When a young sub, just new to the police force, used the
word ‘killed’ instead of the official dispersed in a report he had submitted, he
was severely reprimanded and told to correct his error. The sub, described as
‘rather a wag’, rewrote the report thus: ‘We successfully surrounded the said
party of aborigines and dispersed fifteen, the remainder, some half dozen,
succeeded in escaping.’ 63 So-called collisions between Aborigines and the
native police force were usually massacres. Individual shootings were described
as self-defence (like most police shootings are). Reports invariably
recorded how the police, exercising great restraint, were forced in the end to
shoot. The few reports that exist are euphemistic cover-ups of the carnage that
really took place.
Legal killings are called executions: to execute was once a euphemism
whose literal sense was (as it still is in other contexts) ‘to do or perform’.