Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Bad language? Jargon, slang, swearing and insult 63
I [the Prime Minister] stared at the sheet of paper, mesmerised. Finally, I looked up
at Humphrey. ‘Could you summarise this please?’ I asked.
He thought hard for a moment. ‘We did a deal,’ he replied. (Lynn and Jay 1989: 402f)
Figure 3.1 Bureaucratese (from Yes, Prime Minister).
Delete ‘Bottlenecks’, insert ‘Localised Capacity Deficiencies’. (Quoted in Cutts and
Maher 1984: 45)
No wonder Charles Dickens referred to Whitehall as the Circumlocution
Office. Bureaucratese is nicely mocked in the excerpt from Yes, Prime
Minister, Figure 3.1.
In American English, the general term for bureaucratese is gobbledygook,
whereas in British and Australian English the sense of this word has
generalized to mean ‘(any type of) incomprehensible language’. The word
was coined by Texas Congressman Maury Maverick 13 ‘thinking of the old
bearded turkey gobbler back in Texas, who was always gobbledy-gobbling
and strutting with ludicrous pomposity. At the end of this gobble there was a
sort of gook’. 14 In other words, gobbledygook is the mouthing of a turkey.
Used of a person, cross-varietal synonyms of American English turkey
include Australian English dork, dill, galah and British English wally and
prat.
Demands for understandable ‘plain language’ have been heard throughout
the history of English. It took many centuries for English to be accepted as
a written language. Latin and Greek were the languages of religion and