Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

3 Bad language? Jargon, slang, swearing and insult
Towards the end of Chapter 2, we remarked that the use of jargon is
sometimes judged dysphemistic. This chapter reviews the reason for the
denigration of jargon that leads some people to censor it; we seek to rehabilitate
jargon. There are people for whom slang is taboo. We discuss the
similarities and differences between jargon and slang, and X-phemistic evaluations
of both. We also look at where swearing fits in the picture. Both slang
and profane swearing are found only in colloquial styles – which leads us to
the discussion of styles as varieties of English. From swearing and cursing, we
proceed to insults and maledictions. Except for style, all these topics have at
some time been referred to as ‘bad’ language.
Jargon
Readers of the previous chapter may well regard terms like orthophemism and
cross-varietal synonymy as unwelcome jargon. Most people use the term
jargon pejoratively, as does the author of the following quotation:
At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as ‘the cognitiveaffective
state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning the
reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance’. That is jargon – the
practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earthrestructuring
implement. (Bryson 1984: 85)
So, should jargon be censored? Many people think it should. However, close
examination of jargon shows that, although some of it is vacuous pretentiousness,
1 and therefore dysphemistic, its proper use is both necessary and unobjectionable.
Our purpose here is to explain how jargon comes to be both
dysphemistic on the one hand and euphemistic (as well as orthophemistic) on
the other.
The word jargon probably derives from the same source as gargle, namely
Indo-European *garg- meaning ‘throat’, 2 and it originally referred to any
noise made in the throat. In Middle English, it was generally used to describe
the chattering of birds, or human speech that sounded as meaningless as the
chattering of birds (OED 1, 3). A French–English Dictionary of 1650 lists:
55