Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Taboo, censoring and the human brain 247
For instance, if finches are not exposed to song within the first fifteen
months, they never acquire a normal song. Humans are similar: there exists
in our early lives a window of opportunity during which language must be
acquired. Our brain gets set in its ways, and if linguistic skills have not been
acquired, they remain deficient. 26 Bilingual studies of taboo and arousal add
further support to the hypothesis of a critical learning period for language
acquisition.
Neurological and psychiatric disorders shed additional light on the neural
architecture that underpins the production and control of taboo expressions.
People with certain kinds of dementia and/or aphasia lose all language ability,
except the ability to produce dirty words. 27 The technical term for the involuntary
utterance of obscene language is coprolalia (from Greek kopros ‘dung’
and lalia ‘talk’). It is related to the variety of highly emotional language that
we automatically produce when we are angry and frustrated, under pressure,
or in sudden pain. People who manifest this kind of disorder curse profusely,
producing what sound like exclamatory interjections as an emotional reaction.
However, if called upon to repeat the performance, they are unable to do so
because they have lost the capacity to construct ordinary language. Dirty
words, abusive words and slurs pour forth from the victims of these particular
mental disorders, just because these expressions are stored separately from
other language.
Further evidence linking taboo language to the limbic system (the emotional
processing areas) comes from people manifesting Tourette’s Syndrome
(TS), a neurological disorder associated with frequent and repetitive involuntary
vocal tics (utterances of noises or words) and motor tics (muscle movements).
The range of symptoms that can be seen in TS includes copropraxia
(the compulsion to make obscene gestures), coprolalia (the compulsion to
vocalize obscene or other socially unacceptable words or phrases), even
coprographia (the compulsion to write obscene expressions), as well as
echolalia and echopraxia (the mimicking of other people’s language and
movements). These tics are a type of spasm that can be more or less controlled
(much like an urge to scratch an itch or to sneeze). Some people seem able to
hold back their tics for hours at a time, although suppressing them can
sometimes lead to more severe outbursts later. The tics increase with stress
and decrease when the person is relaxed or concentrating on an absorbing
task. We quote from some responses to a web forum on coprolalia, maintained
by the Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital;
they have been written either by sufferers of TS (Touretters) or close relatives.
28 (The typos and typography are in the originals.)
[1] Coprolalia, in my experience, seems to be the expression of maximal socially
inappropriate noise. In my case, coprolalia consists of loud belching, often saying a