Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

270 Notes to pages 168–76
nickname from ekename, and pea from pease. The assumption is that, e.g. a nadder
pronounced /enæde/ got reanalyzed into an adder, same pronunciation. A nickname
is a reanalysis of an ekename (‘eke’ ¼ ‘also’). If you know the nursery rhyme that
begins Pease pudding hot, you have met the pre-1600 singular and plural form for
‘pea’. Peas(e) was then reanalysed as a regular plural of pea. Another kind of
example is I could of done it. Much of the time, both of and many instances of have
(particularly following a modal) have exactly the same pronunciation /ev/ , /v/ , or
/e/ (cf. the written forms cuppa and coulda). They become confused, and of usually
replaces have, in both writing and pronunciation, e.g. /k d v/. A third kind is
exemplified by the distress call Mayday, from French M’aidez ‘help me’; the score
love in tennis, from French l’oeuf ‘the egg’, shape of 0; the phrase checkmate in
chess, from Persian Shah māt(a) ‘the king is dead’; and the compound (Australian)
noun chaise-lounge is a sort of metathesis from French [chaise] longue, being
confused in this context with lounge [chair]. In the jargon of nursing, folk etymology
has led to the substitution of carative from curative because nurses care for
patients, whereas doctors cure them.
72 Dauzat 1938.
73 Enright 1985: 10; Aman and Sardo 1982; Ernster 1975.
74 Cf. Allan 2001: 166ff.
75 Cleland 1985: 77, 143.
76 Grose 1811.
77 1647–80.
78 Burr 1766: 86. The poem was probably written in 1674.
79 ‘Steel waters’ from the chalybeate springs at Tunbridge; ‘A back of steel’ ¼
vigorous copulation.
80 Keesing 1982: 31.
81 New Idea, 21 March 1962, p. 39.
82 Arango 1989: 49, 46.
83 See the recipes and remedies collected in Cockayne 1865. Camporesi (1988: 154)
describes the importance of dung-based health programmes in early Europe.
84 Durkheim 1963: 94f.
85 Meigs 1978.
86 William McGregor, p.c.
87 Meigs 1978: 312.
88 Aristotle 1984, Generation of Animals 728a28–9.
89 See Allan and Burridge 1991: 130f.
8 FOOD AND SMELL
1 See, for example, http://www.restaurant.org/rusa/ and http://www.concierge.com
for restaurant reviews featuring comfort foods. Accessed May 2005.
2 See Dallman et al. 2003 for a new view of ‘comfort food’.
3 On inalienable possession, see Chapter 6 and Chappell and McGregor 1995.
4 Fernándes-Armesto 2001: 22.
5 Mission statement of the Slow Food Movement; http://www.slowfood.com. Accessed
November 2004.