Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

70 Forbidden Words
the terms argot and cant, but assume that everything denoted by these terms
falls under our terms jargon and slang.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, slang denoted the ‘thieves-
Latin’, the ‘vulgar tongue of the lowest blackguards in the nation’. So slang
is, by association, ‘bad language’, such that any language disapproved of on
moral grounds (as profanity, swearing, obscenity) will be branded slang and
subjected to censoring.
The most significant characteristic of slang overlaps with a defining
characteristic of jargon: slang is a marker of in-group solidarity, and so it
is a correlate of human groups with shared experiences, such as being
children at a certain school or of a certain age, or being a member of a
certain socially definable group, such as hookers, junkies, jazz musicians
or professional criminals. For example, Polari (aka Parlare, Pa(r)lary,
Parl(y)aree, Panarly) is a slang used by British homosexuals in the twentieth
century, which probably derived from slang used by actors, show-people and
other mendicants, and overlaps with slang still widely used in the London
area (and perhaps elsewhere). The use of slang within a definable group gives
rise to the other overlap with jargon as sublanguage. Not only medicalese and
legalese, but also street jargon/slang, druggie jargon/slang, ‘criminalese’,
queer slang and the like, have many terms with synonyms in other jargons/
slangs – i.e. there are cross-varietal synonyms. The slangs serve as in-group
recognition devices and purportedly disguise meanings from out-groupers –
which is why Halliday described them as antilanguage, ‘the language of the
antisociety’. 27 Consider examples from several regions: work for ‘work as a
prostitute’, a trick or a john for ‘a prostitute’s client’; tea or grass for
‘marijuana’, shit for ‘cannabis resin’, speed for ‘amphetamines’, horse or
brown sugar for ‘heroin’, snow for ‘cocaine’, the works or a fit for a
mainliner’s ‘hypodermic syringe and spoon’; a grass for ‘a police informer’;
doing porridge or at college for ‘being in prison’. To a greater extent than
jargon, slang is ‘antilanguage’ because it is intended to dissimilate users from
out-groupers. The language of those involved in unofficial or illegal activities
needs to exclude regulators and law officers; it is reported that the language
of drug addicts changes constantly and rapidly for this reason. 28 Out-groupers
meet with severe problems when trying to learn and use the slang of a
particular group. For example, teenagers today use ‘inverted language’:
someone who is particularly attractive might be described as scum; words
like vicious, sick, rancid and putrid describe things which are exceptionally
good. Parents and teachers who try using this sort of slang to show empathy
with the youngsters usually sound phoney; however, wicked ‘exceptionally
good’ seems to have escaped into the wider community and is often heard in
adverts. Perhaps wicked plays on the fact that excessive enjoyment is, like