Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Notes to pages 23–36 257
but the Bible, followed by dictionaries, encyclopedias and literary works by such
as Dickens, Henry James and Shakespeare, then medical books and pamphlets.
Authors such as Boccaccio, Baudelaire, Chaucer, or Flaubert did not rate a mention.
Given that respondents were willing to report on masturbatory practices and what
they found sexually stimulating (men, dancing, art), we may assume that they were
being honest. One must conclude that the power of written texts to subvert the
morality of young women lacks proof.
42 The Annals, book XIV: 50 (Tacitus 1908: 444).
43 Jansen 1991: 46.
44 Robert Mapplethorpe is a rather indifferent photographer by comparison with say
Horst, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston or Dorothea Lange. However his photos of
gays, fisting, sado-masochism, a man pissing into another’s mouth, himself dressed
as Satan with a bull-whip in his arse for a tail, and the fact that he was to die of AIDS
led to a notoriety that increased his saleability. See Hughes 1993: 163.
45 Quoted in James Hall, ‘Kids’ author in the bad books’, Weekend Australian, 25
September 2004.
46 As Karl Marx wrote: ‘The real, radical cure of the censorship is its abolition. For it
is a bad institution’ (Marx 1974: xii).
2 SWEET TALKING AND OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE
1 Another way to interpret the term X-phemism is to imagine that X {ortho-,
eupho-, dys-}.
2 We do not distinguish between ‘tact’ and ‘social politeness’ as do Janney and
Arndt 1992; it seems to us that ‘social politeness’ is communalized ‘tact’ (a similar
view to Blum-Kulka 1992: 258).
3 This psycho-emotive characterization of the preferred–dispreferred dichotomy is at
odds with its use by conversational analysts like Atkinson and Drew 1979, Bilmes
1988, Toolan 1989 or Boyle 2000.
4 These two aspects of face; are respectively positive and negative face; see Brown and
Levinson 1987; Watts, Ide et al. 1992; Scollon and Scollon 1995; Lee-Wong 2000.
5 These expressions were used in defining the meaning of a reasonable man by
Lord Justice Greer in Hall v. Brookside Club (Law reports, King’s Bench Division,
vol. I, 1933: 224), but they serve our purpose well. This despite Lord Justice Greer
displaying his prejudice against the ordinary man by saying, ‘God forbid that the
standard of manners should be taken from the man on the Clapham omnibus.’
Today, we have a more demotic notion of the standard of polite manners.
6 Jenkinson 1979: 12.
7 The law in the state of New South Wales, Australia.
8 The first time fuck was used in a film was either in 1967 in Ulysses or in 1968 in
I’ll Never Forget Whatshisname . . . The first use of fuck in a hit was in M*A*S*H
1970. Its first use in a PG rated film was in 1976 in All the President’s Men and
also The Front. In 1970, on Britain’s live-to-air Frost Programme, Felix Dennis
described Jerry Rubin as ‘the most unreasonable cunt I’ve ever known in my life!’
A Monty Python sketch ‘The Travel Agent’ was about a man who replaces the
letter c with a b, and who chides himself with being a silly bunt. The word cunt was
scripted in a 1979 drama No Mama No. John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) caused