Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

62 Forbidden Words
another point of view, there are people who might prefer to say, euphemistically,
they have spirochaetal or luetic disease rather than the orthophemistic
syphilis, just as people may prefer to say Excuse me a moment or I have to go
to the loo instead of I have to urinate / have a piss.
Some jargons seem to use highfalutin language for simple notions: uplift is
another motivation for jargon. Official language describing poverty, for
example, draws overwhelmingly from the Romance and Classical languages.
It is characterized by the flourishing of terms like indigent, impecunious,
destitute and impoverished that seek to upgrade alternative nomenclature.
Poverty is an area of social taboo – an inevitable target for euphemism.
Recent times have seen a rise in circumlocutions like economically marginalised,
negatively privileged, economically non-affluent, culturally deprived
or even differently advantaged. The hamburger industry’s use of the term
autocondimentation as opposed to precondimentation is an economical way
of distinguishing a client’s right to sauce his/her own hamburger. It is
certainly not necessary to use autocondimentation in order to get the meaning
across, so why use it? The answer is, of course, that it confers on the
hamburger industry a certain dignity. The dignity comes from the Greek or
Latin roots of the words used (the Graeco-Latinate lexicon), because they are
reminiscent of such prestigious jargons as legalese and ‘medicalese’. 11
Jargons like ‘bureaucratese’ (the language of government and corporate
offices) have two motivations. One, shared with criminal jargon and slang, is
the exclusion of out-groupers. This exclusion is in part designed to intimidate
the populace through mystification. The second motivation is shared with the
hamburger industry. The matters with which bureaucrats deal are mostly
mundane and can be fully described and discussed in sixth-grade English.
In order to augment their self-image, therefore, bureaucrats create synonyms
for existing vocabulary using a Graeco-Latinate lexicon, seeking to obfuscate
the commonplace and endow it with gravity; this achieves a double-whammy
by mystifying and intimidating the clientele. A notice to householders from
the City of Fitzroy in Melbourne, Australia, 12 read:
Refuse and rubbish shall not be collected from the site or receptacles thereon before
the hour of 8.00am or after the hour of 6.00pm of any day.
It contains some quintessential features of ponderous legalese: (1) the doublets
refuse and rubbish and the site or receptacles thereon; (2) shall with a
third person subject; (3) the negative proposition refuse and rubbish shall not
be collected; (4) the archaic adverbial thereon; and (5) the redundant phrase
the hour of. Householders would probably have found it easier to understand
the more colloquial We will collect your garbage between 8.00am and
6.00pm. We rarely uncover such blatant lexical substitution as the following
emendation to a traffic plan for a London borough: