Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Sweet talking and offensive language 41
dirty words denotes people’s attitudes toward the denotations and connotations
of the words. The dysphemism shit is no more dirty than the word faeces
nor the euphemism poo.
Epithets for taboo topics, and the words naming them, are bad, dirty, filthy,
foul, gross, grotty, impure, unclean, vile and so forth; hence the parent’s
command to a child heard uttering a taboo term: Wash your mouth out!
Tabooed and offensive behaviour is sometimes described as off, like rotting
food. Tabooed language is referred to as off-colour, 15 again like rotting food
or a sick person. The producer of off-colour language may be accused of
having a mind like a drain or a cess-pit (a conduit or receptacle for foul
effluent). There is an association between dirt, rotting organic material, and
bodily effluvia like ear-wax, menstrual blood, piss, semen, shit, snot, spit,
sweat and vomit. Social conventions (based in part on sound medical evidence)
require us to ‘wash our hands’ after contact with the effluvium, before
we handle food or shake hands with others. Thus dirt and other words within
the same semantic field typically have dysphemistic connotations. Offensive
(dysphemistic) behaviours are often described as dirty, e.g.: act shitily, be a
shit, be dirty (‘addicted to illicit drugs’), dirty business, dirty deeds, dirty
looks, do the dirty on, play dirty, foul play and so on.
The noun dirt is in the same semantic field as crud, evil, grot, grunge,
gunge, impurity, insanitary, mess, muck, pollution, slops, stain, something the
cat brought in. Someone or something dirty may be described as crude, evil,
grotty, grubby, impure, insanitary, lewd, manky, mucky, scuzzy, seedy, sleazy,
slovenly, sordid, squalid, unclean.
One gets and gives the dirt on someone to blacken his/her name; rotting
substances go black, and the verb blacken is associated with the darkness of
night and hence the black arts of malevolent witchcraft too. A dysphemistic
act is said to be a rotten thing to do, tostink, and so forth. Like dirt, diseases
contaminate people, and a person without a sexually transmissible disease
might describe him/herself to a prospective sexual partner as clean; so too
might a person rehabilitated after addiction to hard drugs. People with bad
characters (like shysters, slatterns, slobs, sluts) contaminate and corrupt
others – perhaps, if they have a mind like a cess-pit – by using dirty words
that pollute the atmosphere or by uttering profanities that defile.
That part of tabooed language constituted by dirty words consists of
terms for:
bodily organs concealed by bikinis and swimming trunks – because they
are organs of sexual desire, stimulation and gratification and/or used for
micturition and defecation;
activities involving these SMD (sex, micturition, defecation) organs;
bodily effluvia issuing from these SMD organs.