Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Notes to pages 243–49 275
13 Pullum 1991.
14 Cf. McGinnies 1949; Nothman 1962; Gray et al. 1982; Van Lancker and Cummings
1999; Jay 1992, 2000.
15 Osgood et al. 1957
16 McGinnies 1949; Zajonc 1962; Gray et al. 1982; Dinn and Harris 2000.
17 Jay 2000: 102–5 outlines a battery of laboratory experiments from the 1960s
through to the 1990s that look at the recall of taboo words.
18 MacKay et al. 2004.
19 Harris et al. 2003.
20 For example, in Gonzalez-Regiosa 1976 Spanish–English bilinguals were required to
read lists of ten Spanish taboo words and ten English taboo words. Participants were
then asked to rate themselves on their degree of anxiety. Both high- and low-anxiety
participants rated themselves as more anxious after reading the taboo words in their
first language. Other studies (for example, Anooshian and Hertel 1994) that have
looked at recall also support the fact that words in a speaker’s first language have
stronger emotional effects. Here is a true story: an Australian woman was speaking
German to a native German speaker during a plane flight. After some time, the man
revealed that he was a manufacturer of women’s sanitary products and whenever he
had to name items such as sanitary pad and tampon, heconsistentlyswitchedto
English; even though he knew the woman was a native English speaker, it was less
embarrassing for him to utter such words in his second language.
21 Though see Jay 1992.
22 Miss A. M. Miller (born 1906), interviewed in 1978 by Moya Gunn, of La Trobe
University.
23 On children’s use of dirty words, see Hartmann 1973; Jay 1992; 2000; Morris
2000: 173.
24 Harris et al. 2003: 12.
25 Kim et al. 1997.
26 This has been linked to brain development. At birth, there is relatively little
difference between the functioning of the two brain hemispheres; but around the
age of two there begins the process of lateralization, whereby the right and left
hemispheres each take over a dominant role for certain mental functions. In most
right-handers, the left hemisphere is dominant for language – left-handers are a
more complicated bunch. However, the relationship between language and lateralization
is an extremely complex one and is the subject of continuing neurolinguistic
research. While the development of this neural one-sidedness would
appear to overlap with the main period when first-language acquisition takes place,
the hypothesis of a critical learning period is still a controversial one. Smith 2002
summarizes the various pieces of evidence for the critical learning hypothesis but
declares the matter controversial.
27 Jay 2000 offers a comprehensive account of the mental disorders associated with
coprolalia and other coprophenomena.
28 http://neuro-www.mgh.harvard.edu/forum_2/TouretteSyndromeF/5.7.997.16PM
Causesforcopr.html. Accessed October 2004.
29 These last two cases are discussed in Berecz 1992.
30 Jay 2000: 235–41.
31 Posted 18 May 1999.