Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Sweet talking and offensive language 35
In order to be polite to a casual acquaintance of the opposite sex, in a
formal situation, in a middle-class environment, one would normally be
expected to use the euphemism or orthophemism rather than the dispreferred
counterpart. The dispreferred counterpart would be a dysphemism.
We do not suggest that the middle-class politeness criterion fails to apply
between, say, close acquaintances of the same sex; however, language exchange
between casual acquaintances of different sexes offers the most
probable default conditions for the MCPC. Let us suppose that, by the
middle-class politeness criterion, I’m going to the bathroom is a euphemism
for, and preferred to, I’m going to urinate – in which case the latter must be
the dispreferred (tabooed) expression.
Our definition of the middle-class politeness criterion invites the question,
what is a middle-class environment? It is a deliberately vague notion used to
exclude, on the one hand, those so rich and/or so powerful that they can
disregard social conventions observed by the mass of the community; on the
other hand, it also excludes those so uneducated, poor and deprived that they
are unaware of, or cannot afford to observe, the niceties of such social
conventions. We use the description ‘middle-class’ to mean much the same
as the apocryphal man on the Clapham omnibus or the man who takes the
magazines at home and in the evening pushes the lawn mower in his shirt
sleeves or the man in the street – all of which were intended to refer to very
ordinary persons of either sex. 5 Dictionaries such as the OED, Webster’s and
the Longman Advanced Learner’s Dictionary give meanings that we would
say observe the middle-class politeness criterion. Of course, not everyone
would agree. In 1976, the educational commissioner of Texas banned the four
major American college dictionaries (among others) from schools; he
objected to terms like bed, clap, deflower, john, G-string, slut, bastard and
many others. Newspaper accounts of dictionaries being banned from the
school libraries and classrooms of small-town USA are commonplace. 6
Many hundreds of terms are now labeled as disparaging, contemptuous or offensive in
dictionaries, often on the strength of dubious evidence but out of fear that they will be
taken to be insensitive to some group. The Encarta World English Dictionary (EWED)
has carried this trend to an extreme. EWED considers almost any word offensive that has
to do with mental or physical incapacity, mental mistakes, sex, age, or race. It considers
the word madness offensive, and one can’t call someone a nut or nutty or a nutcase in its
book without being offensive. Weirdo is off limits, and no one can be a basket case or a
vegetable or off his (or her) rocker, screwed up, schizoid,orhandicapped. EWED makes
no distinction between words used humorously or affectionately and words used to
insult. So among the words it labels offensive are jerk, slob, schnook, klutz, loony,
and crazy. It views language as a fortified castle of virtue, and every battlement is
equipped with a cannon loaded with warnings. (Lindau 2001: 234)