Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Notes to pages 78–93 261
52 Goffmann 1978.
53 Most people are right-hand dominant, and their left brain processes language. This
is not true for every right-hander, and left-handers are not necessarily right-brain
dominant.
54 Jay 2000: 36–43.
55 Jay 2000: 84.
56 Among American children, bitch is the favourite insult from girl to girl and used
proportionately more often than by boys (who also target girls with it, of course);
cf. Jay 1992: 60–7.
57 Jay 1992: 78.
58 You pussy! is used, as already mentioned.
59 A pisshead is a drunk, so it doesn’t fall in with this category of insult.
60 Nun’s Priest’s Tale, line 4565.
61 This leaves one suspicious of those British sports fans who dub themselves The
Barmy Army, though they have hitherto been well enough behaved.
62 Jay 1992: 25. George W. Bush is often mockingly called Shrub (a negative
comparison with his father).
63 Clyne 1987. Disease metaphors are common as racist slurs; cf. Dawidowicz 1975:
54; Sontag 1979.
64 Kennedy 2003.
65 Dan Burley, ‘The Dirty Dozen’, The Citizen Call, 30 July 1960.
66 Many are taken from ‘Rules for ritual insults’, Labov 1972: 297–353.
67 Jay 2000: 59.
68 Grosser and Walsh reported that men recall taboo words more readily than women;
however this could in part be an artefact of the experimenter being male (1966:
226). The experiment also predated the feminist movement, which has given
women more freedom to speak and act.
69 According to Montagu 1968: 55, ‘American Indians do not swear, nor do the
Japanese, nor do Malayans and most Polynesians.’
4 THE LANGUAGE OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
1 Cited on the Australian Financial Review wire services, 6 May 1991.
2 The Age 18 June 1991.
3 Dickstein 1993: 554; Goodheart 1993: 551.
4 Perry 1992: 71.
5 Lakoff 2000: 94–5.
6 Perry 1992 offers a short account of the history of the term ‘political correctness’.
7 See Wilson 1995: 3 and also Baron’s discussion in The Linguist List, 9 June 1996.
8 See accounts in Perry 1992 and Cameron 1995.
9 Cf. Peter Jeans, ‘So Correct and So Funny’, The West Australian, 26 December
1998, p. 7.
10 Cameron 1995: 82–4 discusses moral panic, in relation to the public concerns
about the teaching of English grammar that broke out in Britain at the end of the
1980s. We look at this in the next chapter.
11 Kramer 1993: 573 is one who expresses the view that political correctness is a
serious threat to the well-being of language and in the same breath argues that it