Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

258 Notes to pages 38–51
national outrage when he used fuck on British television in 1976; when he used
cunt in 2004 there were only 73 complaints from an audience of 10.5 million
(http://members.lycos.co.uk/mathunt/disstertation.html [sic]. Accessed July 2004).
The first use of cunt in a mainstream film may be in Mike Nichols’ Carnal
Knowledge of 1971. The phrase fucking, cheating cunt (quoting a cricket umpire)
was printed in The Independent newspaper in 1988, though both fuck and cunt
appeared in a quote from Tony Harrison’s poem V in The Times (London) in 1987.
9 Cf. Maines 1999.
10 Cf. Rosten 1968.
11 The Hebrew letters EFEJ read from right to left are Yod Heh Vav Heh.
12 This dates from the first half of the twentieth century but may not be anachronistic.
In the 1990s, have my rag(s) was still being used in a girls’ boarding school in
Adelaide, Australia.
13 Frazer 1911: 318.
14 See Aristotle, On Interpretation 16a, 19.
15 Also blue.
16 Cicero 1959, Epistulae ad Familiares IX, xxii.
17 See Grose 1811.
18 See Arbeitman 1980: 78f. Perhaps gay kept its dark side hidden for a long time; see
below.
19 Epistulae ad Familiares IX, xxii.
20 Donkey was originally pronounced to rhyme with modern monkey; the word was a
sort of diminutive of dun, which for centuries had been a name for a horse and is
also an appropriate colour term for an ass
21 Bloomfield 1927: 228.
22 Hock 1986: 295.
23 Ana Deumert, p.c. 2002. A British gardening magazine uses the old spelling Caffre
lime for Citrus hystrix, perhaps euphemistically (Gardens Illustrated, September
2004: 80). Another example of dissimilation is that in Christchurch, New Zealand,
the synagogue is not Christchurch Synagogue, but Canterbury Synagogue.
24 We have already referred to the comments of Read 1977, Osgood et al. 1957, and
MacWhinney et al. 1982.
25 This is further discussed later in this book. Cf. Valenstein and Heilman 1979: 431;
Jay 2000: chs. 1, 5, 8.
26 Kobjitti 1983.
27 Farb 1974: 82.
28 Cicero 1959, Epistulae ad Familiares IX, xxii.
29 Cf. Ernster 1975; Hays 1987.
30 BBC Brains Trust session of 26 April 1948. Blackwell and Ruja 1994: 494;
Metcalf 1986: 179.
31 Winston Churchill delivered his ‘iron curtain’ speech given at Westminster College,
Fulton, Missouri, 5 March 1946. The end was marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall
on Thursday 9 November 1989.
32 http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPPrint/LAC/20030416/
RVRUSS_2/TPColumnists/. Accessed April 2004.
33 Strom 1984: 7, quoted by Clyne 1987: 38.