Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

250 Forbidden Words
are expressions that we usually censor from our utterances when we wish to
present ourselves as being polite. However, for most people there are contexts
where the censoring is relaxed and we speak freely. The tabooed expressions
include sexual and scatological obscenities, ethnic–racial slurs, insults, namecalling,
profanity, blasphemy, slang, jargon and vulgarities of all kinds,
including the forbidden words of non-standard grammar. They range along
scales of offensiveness, potency and wounding capacity, but they are all of
them emotionally powerful in some way.
It would be interesting to measure (using, say, electrodermal monitoring)
the emotional impact of a wider range of forbidden language forms, beyond
the kinds of obscenity so far investigated; we have in mind slipshod pronunciations,
‘mistakes’ in grammar, newfangled meanings, colloquialisms, jargon,
clichés, new coinages and PC expressions. Early in 2004, the Plain English
Campaign asked its five thousand supporters to nominate the phrases in the
English language that most enraged them. 35 The expression at the end of the
day led the field. In equal second place was at this moment in time and the
recurrent use of like. These were followed by the phrase with all due respect.
We guess that psycho-physiological testing would show that an encounter
with one of these irritating phrases not only activates their meaning, but also
leads to emotional arousal. Speakers often describe expressions as getting up
their nose, getting under their skin, getting on their nerves/wick, turning their
stomach, sticking in their throat, making their hair curl / flesh creep / blood
run cold. Irritating words, phrases and grammatical constructions figuratively
touch many parts of the anatomy, and presumably this would be reflected in
larger skin conductance amplitudes of a polygraph tracing.
Verbal taboos serve human interests by setting apart those things that
threaten to cause distress and offence. Many of them have a rational basis:
prohibitions against incest do help to prevent weakened progeny; sensible
explanations can be found for most food preferences and avoidances; the bad
smell theories of disease that held sway until the nineteenth century may have
been built on fantasy, yet we know that communities are far healthier if
human waste is kept at a distance. In the case of avoidance speech styles,
such as the so-called ‘mother-in-law’ languages once used extensively in
Aboriginal Australia, conflict is prevented where relationships are sensitive
and threaten discord to the family unit. Along with appropriate strategies for
naming and addressing others, they arise from the need to maintain social
harmony in human communities. In today’s diverse democratic societies, the
practical problems of maintaining dialogue keep attention to face as critical as
ever.
Many taboos are tied in with our fears. Government censorship, and the
self-censorship of the media in response to government and community