Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

44 Forbidden Words
taboo topics they denote. This is exactly why the terms themselves are often
said to be unpleasant or ugly sounding; why the SMD words among them are
miscalled ‘dirty words’.
There is a wealth of evidence to suggest that where a language expression
is ambiguous between a taboo sense and a non-taboo sense, its meaning will
narrow to the taboo sense alone. This perhaps explains why dysphemistic
language is often referred to as strong language. For instance, since the
1960s, the adjective gay has been used less and less in the sense ‘bright, full
of fun’ (a sense dating back to the Middle Ages) because it also has the
meaning ‘homosexual’. Throughout the centuries, there have been many other
examples of word senses narrowing to the taboo sense alone, and of innocent
vocabulary items that have dropped by the wayside because of bogus associations
with dirty words:
Cicero pointed out that ruta ‘rue’ and menta ‘mint’ could be used without
impropriety; the same was true for the diminutive of ruta, rutula but not of
menta, because the resulting mentula meant ‘penis’. 19
In late eighteenth-century England, ass was gradually replaced by
donkey. 20 The motivation was exactly what Bloomfield 21 noted for the
same change in American English: ass was being confused with arse and
indeed has replaced it in American, with the meaning ‘arse’ or ‘cunt’.
The noun accident once meant ‘that which happens, a chance event’ (cf.
accidentally, by accident), but, except in the phrase happy accident, its
association with misfortune has narrowed the meaning to ‘chance misfortune’,
as in There was an accident or Little Harry had an accident in his
new trousers on his fourth birthday.
Until the late nineteenth century, coney (rhymes with honey) was the word
for ‘rabbit’; it dropped out of use because of the taboo homonym meaning
‘cunt’.
Hock 22 believes that phonetic similarity to fuck led to the demise of the
following words: fuk ‘a sail’; feck (the stem for feckless); feck or fack ‘one
of the stomachs of a ruminant’; fac, an abbreviation for factotum; fack(s)
‘fact(s)’. He may be right with respect to fuk, but the pronunciation /fæk(s)/
is still used freely as the common pronunciation of facts, offax (endclipped
from facsimile [machine]), and of FAQs, the acronym for ‘frequently
asked questions’.
The British still use cock to mean ‘rooster’; but, because of the taboo
homonym meaning ‘penis’, this sense of cock started to die out in America
in the early nineteenth century; it is nowadays very rare in Australia. There
has also been an effect on words containing cock: former Mayor Ed Koch
of New York City gives his surname a spelling-pronunciation /kAč/; the