Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Disease, death and killing 233
the names for certain catastrophic war-time or terrorist events, that become
standards of comparison for roughly comparable events, or events that are
hyperbolically presented that way. A decisive final contest is often referred to
as a waterloo (after the 1815 battle, in which Napoleon was finally defeated).
Pearl Harbor is used as a figure for a sudden and unexpected attack (after the
December 1941 Japanese destruction of the US fleet in Pearl Harbor, which
brought the US into the Second World War). 911 (or 9/11), pronounced ‘nineeleven’,
is the term used for a catastrophic terrorist attack (after 11 September
2001, when four passenger planes were hijacked by al-Qaeda members,
killing those on board and destroying the World Trade Center and part of
the Pentagon, killing 3,030 people and injuring 2,337); 69 a terrorist attack on a
school in Beslan, North Ossetia, which resulted in 334 deaths and about 1,000
injured, was described by many sources as Russia’s 9/11.
Abortion has been legalized in most English-speaking countries for several
decades. Before it was legalized, so-called backyard abortions often created
severe physical trauma to the mother; this, the social cost of the birth of an
unwanted child, and the feminist push to give greater freedom of choice to
women led to its legalization. Those favouring abortion, people who are prochoice,
refer to the product of conception as a foetus; so-called right-to-lifers
instead speak of the foetus as a baby or a child because they argue that there is
no distinction between abortion and infanticide. Curiously, a very few rightto-lifers
believe that although it is morally wrong to abort a fetus, it is not
wrong to murder doctors and others who serve abortion clinics; there have
been several convictions for such murders.
Suicide is mostly regarded as a sin and a path to eternal damnation; it is a
path that a secular society takes measures to prevent, often against the wishes
of the would-be suicide. The excuse seems to be the social cost to the family
of a suicide. Most suicides cannot see the advantages of staying alive; some
suicides wish to kill others along with themselves. This renders them murderers,
and perhaps terrorists, and they are condemned; although if they succeed
in their purpose, the only recourse that society has is to punish the family that
they leave behind.
Another moral dilemma arises with the question of euthanasia (orthophemism).
The spectacular leaps in modern medicine have an ironical twist.
A new fear has appeared – namely, the fear of not-dying. The dread of
spending one’s last years bedridden, alone and attached to some machine is
a very real one, as evident in the current debate over mercy killings. As in the
past, those suffering from chronic illnesses often view death as a welcome
relief from their suffering.
Our anxieties about death have shifted from the fact of dying to the methods that
medicine will use to keep us alive. ‘Don’t let me die on a machine,’ patients now