Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Bad language? Jargon, slang, swearing and insult 67
probably
whoops
:-)
j/k
lol
yur supposed to use your school books for that dummy
ummm no i dun wanna look at em
they’re evil
keep your motherboard manual close to your heart
>:)
lol
(Logged 29 August 2002; sic)
A jargon cannot be precisely defined because the boundaries of any one
particular jargon are impossible to draw non-arbitrarily.
Everyday language picks terms from jargons and expands their use. One
example is the verb to contact which in the early nineteenth century was used
only in its etymologically basic meaning of ‘touch together’. A hundred years
later, its semantic extension to the figurative ‘to get in touch with someone’ –
described by the OED as ‘orig[inally] US colloq[uial]’ – was considered
shocking jargon, and there was public condemnation, one person describing it
as a ‘lubricious barbarism’. 20 This sense of the verb contact undoubtedly fills
a gap in our everyday vocabulary; it is more abstract than call, see or speak to
and less clumsy than get in contact with. Furthermore, speakers are always on
the lookout for newer, more exciting ways of saying something. Epicentre is a
term from geology denoting ‘the true centre of a seismic disturbance’;
recently, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported the arrest of a
person described as ‘the epicentre of a drug ring’. The word ‘epicentre’ seems
to have been chosen because it sounds more exciting or vivid than centre.
Such novel usage attracts criticism. As Dwight Bolinger put it: ‘Old vices are
accepted, new ones viewed with horror – the familiar jargon is the alcohol of
our verbal drug culture, the unfamiliar is its marijuana.’ 21
It is impossible to taboo jargon. Jargon cannot be translated into ‘ordinary
English’ (or whatever language) because there is no such thing. Changing
the jargon alters the message: a speaker simply cannot exchange faeces for
shit or terrorist for freedom-fighter, or even bottlenecks for localised
capacity deficiencies, without changing the connotations of the message
s/he intends to convey. There is no convenient substitute for some jargon:
to replace legalese defendant with a person against whom civil proceedings
are brought is communicatively inefficient. Legal language is difficult because
laws are complex, and not because lawyers try to obfuscate. 22 We
would argue the same for linguisticalese in the earlier quote, repeated here
for convenience: