Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

248 Forbidden Words
word or phrase; and expression of ethnic slurs as words, phrases or little songs. All
quite complex, and definitely socially inappropriate! (12 May 1999)
[2] Uttering unacceptable words causes a delicious reaction in others which makes the
utterer the centre of attention. Perhaps this is initially an attention seeking device
which becomes habit and part of normal speech when the person doesn’t notice the
difference between acceptable and unacceptable. My son went through a phase of
muttering ‘s—t’ all the time which passed after a while when we ceased to show that
we were outraged. Of course another tic took over . . . (25 May 1999)
[3] My 5 yr old daughter sufffers from coprolalia. She has no idea what the words mean.
In fact, I believe coprolalia has almost nothing to do with linguistics or language. It has
to do with socially inapproriate noises – some of which happen to be words. My
daughter’s tics started as grunts and other noises whilst eating. (and I would say that
in my household it was less acceptable to make noises while eating than it was to
swear), and so this is how her tics started. In someone with corpolalia, the need to
perform the tic is proportional to the inappropriateness of the situation. Everybody in
the world suffers from this to a certain degree. Remember how hard it is to hold back
laughter when it is forbidden, but how easy it is to hold back once it is allowed? (there
must be clue in the control of TS in the chemical pathways of laughter stimulation and
inhibition). My daughter suffers from that feeling og being ‘unable to hold it baks’
almost all of the time. Corpolalia is just a socially inapropriate noise – like barking in a
lecture hall. It is really no different. If whistling the national anthem were considered
the most appaling aural insult in western society my daugher would be doing that as a
tic and not swearing. Society shapes the noise that is made, and at this end of the 20th
century, it shapes it into swearing. A couple of centuries ago there was more religious
profanity and blasphemy than swearing because that was an immensely strong social
taboo at that time. Where I live (in the UK) blasphemy is only slightly frowned upon by
the majority, so my daughter has not really picked up on its (former) social significance.
An example of coprolalia:
On putting my daughter to bed at night:
‘I love you, Dad. F**K! Sorry’
Rather naively I once urged her to try to say ‘fun’ instead. The result:
‘Fun -F**K’, Fun-F**k’. (11 May 1999)
It seems that the obscenities associated with this behavioural disorder involve
whatever is most socially inappropriate for the time. [2] is interesting, in that
the young boy stopped saying shit when he failed to get any sort of reaction.
There is one case of a nine-year-old boy who lost his coprolalia entirely when
he was told the words he was uttering were not obscene. A bilingual English–
Spanish speaker reportedly switched the language of his outbursts depending
on the language being spoken around him. 29 The parent in [3] nails a trigger:
if whistling the national anthem were considered shocking, their Touretter
daughter would be doing it as a tic. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that
the symptoms of TS also vary widely from culture to culture. 30 Presumably,
too, in earlier times, people manifesting forms of madness attributed to
diabolical possession or sorcery were often people with TS. These days,