Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

266 Notes to pages 137–47
31 We are grateful to Jun Yano for help with the facts about Japanese. There is an
interesting discussion of the history of Japanese addressing and referring forms in
Traugott and Dasher 2002: 228–52, 258–78.
32 15 July 1976.
33 Hickey 2003: 23.
34 Ana Deumert (p.c.) says that if she met ‘someone in the eco-shop in Heidelberg
who wears jeans, sandals and long hair, I would say du irrespective of his/her age’.
35 See Hickey 2003.
36 See Chapter 2.
37 Cf. Brown and Levinson 1987.
38 On the connotations of names and terms of address, see Brown and Ford 1961;
Brown and Gilman 1960; Brown and Gilman 1989; Ervin-Tripp 1969; Ervin-Tripp
1984; Wierzbicka 1992.
39 Cf. Simons 1982: 177–9.
40 For instance, Dyirbal has an unmarked dialect Guwal, for everyday use, and the
‘mother-in-law language’ JalNuy, which is used (reciprocally) whenever a taboo
relative is in earshot, e.g. in the presence of a classificatory parent-in-law of the
opposite sex, a child-in-law of the opposite sex, and/or a cross-cousin of the
opposite sex. Except for just four words, Guwal and JalNuy have no nouns, verbs,
adjectives or adverbs in common. JalNuy dayubin ‘climb’ is used in place of all of
Guwal waynyjin ‘motion up (uphill)’, bilinya ‘climb a tree unaided’, bumirranyu
‘climb a tree aided by a length of vine’. More precise meanings can be expressed in
JalNuy by circumlocution, with bilinya replaced by dayubin danduNga ‘climb tree’,
bumirranyu by dayubin juyibila ‘climb [with] vine’. Similarly, the single JalNuy
word jamuy ‘grub’ can be further specified to identify with one of five Guwal
nouns: jumbun ‘long wood grub’, bugulum ‘small round bark grub’, mandija
‘milky pine grub’, gija ‘candlenut tree grub’, and gaban ‘acacia tree grub’.
41 These matters were examined in Chapter 4.
42 There is an excellent comprehensive survey in Henley 1989: 65. She wrote: ‘in no
referential studies known to me has the masculine been found to reference females
as readily as males’ (her italics).
43 There is a nice example in Cleese and Booth, The Psychiatrist (1988: 191f).
7 SEX AND BODILY EFFLUVIA
1 Cameron and Kulick 2003: 5.
2 Blackledge 2003.
3 Figures given in Stengers and Neck 2001 suggest that about 90 per cent of men and
at least 25 per cent of women have masturbated. The latter figure strikes us as low
– certainly if partner masturbation is taken into account.
4 Oraison 1972: 87, cited in Stengers and Neck 2001: 166.
5 There was doublethink here: blood-letting was rife as a curative from the sixteenth
to the nineteenth centuries; not for nothing were doctors known as leeches.
6 Baden-Powell’s euphemism in Scouting for Boys.
7 See Stengers and Neck 2001 for detailed discussion of Onania.
8 Aman 1984–5: 106.