Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

64 Forbidden Words
scholarship; like other vernacular languages, English was the language of the
street. In Renaissance Europe, emerging literate groups from the middle classes
struggled to understand the Latin documents in which their legal and professional
rights were set out before they were rendered into the vernacular languages. It is
hardly surprising that when scribes began writing in English they attempted to
emulate what they considered to be the good classical style of Ancient Greece
and Rome, and borrowed extensively from Greek and especially Latin. This gave
rise to the arcane professional jargons that are now being popularized by reinterpretation
in ‘plain English’ and the like. Participants in the inkhorn controversy,
as it came to be known, protested against what they saw as the excessive
borrowing of learned words, especially from Greek and Latin. The inkhorn
terms, branded as dark (‘obscure, not perspicuous’), led John Locke (in 1690)
to write, ‘Modern philosophers . . . have endeavored to throw off the Jargon of the
Schools, and speak intelligibly.’ 15
In the seventeenth century, the language of pompous, prating, incomprehensible
physicians was often mocked in plays. When the sister of a
colonel wounded in a duel asks a surgeon about her brother’s condition,
he replies:
SURGEON: Cava Vena: I care but little for his wound i’ th orsophag, not thus much
trust mee, but when they come to diaphragma once, the small intestines,
or the Spynall medull, or th rootes of the emunctories of the noble parts,
then straight I feare a syncope; the flankes retyring towards the backe, the
urine bloody, the excrements purulent, and the colour pricking or pungent.
SISTER: Alasse, I’me neer the better for this answer.
SURGEON: Now I must tell you his principal Dolour lies i’ th region of the liver, and
theres both inflammation and turmefaction fear’d marry, I made him a
quadrangular plumation, where I used sanguis draconis, by my faith,
with powders incarnative, which I temperd with oyle of Hypericon, and
other liquors mundificative.
SISTER: Pox a your mundies figatives, I would they were all fired.
SURGEON: But I propose lady to make an other experiment at next dressing with a
sarcotrike, medicament, made of Iris of Florence. Thus, (masticke,)
calaphena, apoponax, sacrocalla.
SISTER: Sacro-halter, what comfort is i’ this to a poore gentlewoman: pray tell me
in plaine tearmes what you think of him.
(Thomas Middleton, A Faire Quarrell, IV; quoted in Porter 1995: 43; sic)
Is it much different today?
Family members look intently at the physician as he speaks. ‘Scan . . . cytology . . .
report . . . primary site . . . malignant tumor . . . adenocarcinoma . . . metastasis . . .’
Brows furrow as the family continues to hear: ‘excision . . . chemotherapy . . .
contraindicated . . . radiotherapy . . . palliative . . . any questions?’ ‘Yes,’ responds