Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

232 Forbidden Words
Otherwise, it is capital punishment (from a time when the head – ‘capital’ –
was chopped off). Macbeth spoke of Duncan’s taking-off; 64 and more modern
descriptions of criminal and undercover murders include it’s curtains for X,
rub X out, take care of / terminate / waste / silence X; from hanging, be/get
strung up; from lynching, decorate a cottonwood. In a funeral oration for
someone shot to death in a gangland killing, he was said to have died from
lead poisoning. The CIA had a Health Alteration Committee to decide on
hits. 65 The verb liquidate is a metaphor from the comparatively harmless
practice of shutting down a business.
In recent times, names for weapons have been subject to onomastic variation
for reasons of secrecy, avoidance, propaganda and play. During the
development of the army tank in the First World War, the term tank was a
deceptive term, suggesting a storage tank for liquids; however the term has
stuck. When the first atomic bomb was being developed, it was often referred
to by general-for-specific euphemisms like the gadget, the device, the thing
and even the all-embracing it. 66 Although secrecy was doubtless the main
motivation, avoidance (not wanting to face up to the potential horror of its
deployment) may have played a part. Propaganda explains Ronald Reagan’s
naming of a ten-warhead MX missile Peacekeeper, and perhaps the naming of
the Daisy Cutter, used for shock and awe (sudden, noisy and devastating
bombardment from air and land). During the two twentieth-century world
wars, weapons were sometimes given the names of household items; for
example, a machine gun was called both a sewing machine and a coffee mill.
Obversely, household items were given the names of weapons, e.g. hand
grenade was playfully used to mean ‘potato’. 67
During the twentieth century, state-sanctioned deaths resulting from wars,
genocide, engineered famines, environmental and social neglect, and other
humanitarian disasters wiped out well in excess of a hundred million people.
The twenty-first century is keeping up the momentum. Money spent on
weapons far exceeds the resources committed to health programmes. Bureaucratic
terminology tends to dehumanize disaster, 68 such that the 1986 Challenger
Space Shuttle disaster was described by NASA as an anomaly; the
remains of those killed were recovered components placed not in coffins but
in crew transfer containers; all of which plays down the loss of human life
caused by an inattention to safety measures, motivated by short-term political
and financial gain.
The June 1972 Watergate break-in led directly to the resignation of President
Richard M. Nixon in 1974. Watergate became a byword for any real or
suspected hushed-up political scandal, and the suffix -gate was adopted by the
language to give this interpretation to the noun prefixed to it, e.g. Billygate,
Irangate, Camillagate (and Squidgygate), Wine-gate, and from the 2000 US
Presidential election chadgate. Similar, though nothing like so prolific, are