Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

274 Notes to pages 229–43
56 Simons 1982: 193.
57 Brain 1979.
58 Cynthia Read once ruefully reported this to us.
59 US President Reagan’s evil empire (USSR); US President George W. Bush’s axis
of evil – Iraq, Iran, North Korea in 2002.
60 The charges laid against First Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr for the 16 April
1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam in his Court Martial (CM426402) refer four
times to ‘Oriental human being(s)’.
61 Time, 9 January 1984, p. 56; our italics.
62 Orwell 1946.
63 Vogan 1890: 142; see also p. 113. Another report on p. 129 includes the following
chilling remark: ‘The prisoners were marched off in an iligent line or tied to a
line, it don’t much matter, and three miles outside the town they were neatly
dispatched, and left to amuse the crows and ants’ [sic].
64 Shakespeare, Macbeth, I.ii.20.
65 May 1985: 128.
66 Lifton and Olson 1976: 104.
67 Anttila 1972: 139f.
68 Does our own academic turn of phrase do the same when we talk about humanitarian
disasters wiping out more than a hundred million people?
69 http://vikingphoenix.com/news/stn/2003/911casualties.htm. Accessed September 2004.
70 Loftus 1979.
10 TABOO, CENSORING AND THE HUMAN BRAIN
1 Many thanks to Pia Herbert for supplying us with the relevant passages from the
Melbourne Metropolitan Planning Scheme; cf. Börjars and Burridge (2001) for
further discussion.
2 Millwood-Hargrave 2000.
3 Cf. Allan 2001: 132ff.
4 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, II.i.85f.
5 For more examples of these sorts of sound symbolic changes, see Burridge 2004:
142–53.
6 Allan 1986, Allan 2001.
7 Frazer 1911: 318.
8 Wyld 1936: 387.
9 For example, the Macquarie Dictionary 2003.
10 The expression ‘Gresham’s law’ is named after Sir Thomas Gresham, a sixteenthcentury
English financier who worked for King Edward VI. The law dates back to
the 1850s, when it was first used by economist Henry Dunning Macleod to refer
to the tendency (when there is more than one form of money in circulation) for bad
money to drive out good money.
11 Allan 1986 I: 207f; Allan and Burridge 1991: 22ff.
12 Allan and Burridge 1991; Farmer and Henley 1890–1904; Fryer 1963; Healey 1980.