Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

58 Forbidden Words
b. Idioms and abbreviations, e.g. in telecommunications, DNA ‘does not
answer’, MBC ‘major business customer’, HC&F ‘heat coil and fuse’,
LIBFA ‘line bearer fault analysis’; in linguistics, Noun Phrase and NP;
in logic, if and only if and iff; in biology, < and ,.
ii. Syntactic markers such as:
a. imperatives in recipes and knitting patterns;
b. large numbers of impersonal passives in reports of scientific experiments
(e.g. It was observed that . . .);
c. full noun phrases in place of pronouns in legal documents (e.g. A term
of a sale shall not be taken to exclude, restrict or modify the application
of this Part unless the term [not ‘it’] does so expressly or is
inconsistent with that provision).
iii. Presentational markers
a. Prosodic (voice quality, amplitude, rhythm, etc.) and paralinguistic
and/or kinesic (gaze, gesture, etc.) characteristics within a spoken
medium; e.g. a hushed tone and minimal kinesic display is more
frequently expected in ‘funeralese’ than in football commentary or
anecdote.
b. Typographical conventions within a written medium: e.g. in mathematics,
{a,b}, and (a,b) will normally have different and
conventionally prescribed interpretations; in linguistics, language expressions
that are mentioned rather than used are usually italicized.
c. Format in which a text is presented; this is particularly evident in the
written medium, as can be seen from the five examples above.
Jargons are often characterized solely in terms of their vocabularies for two
reasons. First, novel words and words used in new ways are more conspicuous
than are syntactic or phonological novelties. Second, the specialized vocabulary
names those things which are the particular focus of the domain in which
the jargon is used. However, jargon is manifested much more by the form and
structure of birth and death notices, of parliamentary and legal documents, of
recipes, of poems, of stock-market reports, and of football and cricket commentaries
– among the boundless number of examples possible – than simply
the vocabulary used.
Jargon has two functions:
1. to serve as a technical or specialist language for precise and economical
communication;
2. to promote in-group solidarity, and to exclude as out-groupers those
people who do not use the jargon.
To the initiated, jargon is efficient, economical and even crucial, in that it
can capture distinctions not made in the ordinary language. A linguist would