Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

2 Sweet talking and offensive language
Discussion of taboo and the censoring of language naturally leads to a
consideration of politeness and impoliteness, and their interaction with
euphemism (sweet talking), dysphemism (speaking offensively) and orthophemism
(straight talking). The term euphemism (Greek eu ‘good, well’ and
phēmē ‘speaking’) is well known; but its counterpart dysphemism (Greek dys-
‘bad, unfavourable’) rarely appears in ordinary language. Orthophemism
(Greek ortho- ‘proper, straight, normal’, cf. orthodox) is a term we have
coined in order to account for direct or neutral expressions that are not
sweet-sounding, evasive or overly polite (euphemistic), nor harsh, blunt or
offensive (dysphemistic). For convenience, we have also created the collective
term X-phemism to refer to the union set of euphemisms, orthophemisms
and dysphemisms. 1 Important to this discussion is the concept of crossvarietal
synonymy, i.e. words that have the same meaning as other words
used in different contexts. For instance, the X-phemisms poo, shit and faeces
are cross-varietal synonyms because they denote the same thing but have
different connotations, which mark different styles used in different circumstances.
We also examine the criteria for words being labelled ‘dirty’ and
explain why it is that, where a word has a taboo homonym, the polite sense is
usually censored out. Although we focus on English, other languages behave
in a similar way.
Politeness
Every polite tongue has its own rules. (Murray 1824: 174)
To broach the subject of polite terms for impolite topics we need to establish
some ground rules on politeness. What counts as courteous behaviour varies
between human groups; and, because the smallest group consists of just two
people, the variation is boundless. Consequently, the way Ed and Jo address
one another may strike them as polite but Sally as impolite. The manners
regarded as polite in previous centuries sometimes seem ridiculously pedantic
today and, if practised in the twenty-first century, would be inappropriate. For
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