Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Bad language? Jargon, slang, swearing and insult 71
passionate sexual congress or oodles of Belgian chocolates, somehow
unholy.
Like jargon, slang identifies activities, events and objects that have become
routine for those involved, and it has an important function in creating rapport
in the work or recreational environment. Indeed, many jargons have a colloquial
or slang component. Australian ‘hospitalese’ includes slang ‘diagnoses’
like FLK ‘funny looking kid, but it is not known what is wrong’, GOK ‘God
only knows what is wrong’, and cactus ‘dead’. In American hospitals, there
are the terms beached whale ‘obese person’, crock ‘patient deteriorating
rapidly’, gomer ‘derelict with poor personal hygiene’ and squirrel ‘fusspot
who complains too much’. 29 Cupid’s measles is slang for treponemal disease
or syphilis.
Reduction of form is another feature that slang shares with jargon. For
example, terms like rents ( parents, rad ( radical, dis ( disrespect, shot
( good shot, sec ( second, hellava ( hell of a ‘very’, chill ( chill out,
later ( see you(s) later, spaz ( spastic ‘defective’, bro ( brother, prob (
probably, awes ( awesome, dizz ( dizzy, cuz ( cousin (as in Shakespeare),
stiff ( stiff bikkies / shit ‘bad luck!’, stuff ( good stuff, do the biz ( do the
business ‘suffice’. There are a number of reasons for these clippings. Frequent
or everyday words will often crop up in casual settings where abbreviations
are well tolerated, because there is a lot of common ground. In a class
on historical linguistics, a student reduced the cumbersome linguistic termof-art
grammaticalization ‘the creation of grammar’ to gramtion, which
became a buzz word for that particular group. Abbreviation is the result of
the automation that follows from the repetition of articulatory movements. 30
Cognitively, words of high frequency are easier to access for speakers and
hearers.
As we said, most jargon is linguistically conservative (fast changing
domains like information technology are less conservative). Specialized
content works something like formaldehyde, such that jargon expressions
become embalmed, giving rise to skeuomorphy, and become the targets of
censoring by verbal hygienists, 31 like those within the Plain English movement.
One mark of slang that distinguishes it from jargon is that it dates much
faster, the slang of schoolchildren having the fastest turnover of all. A study
of student slang at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, showed that
over a fifteen-year period fewer than 10 per cent of the expressions had
survived. 32 That which is slang for one generation is either outdated for the
next or becomes mainstream. Cool might have made a comeback, but the
language of the ‘beat’ culture of the 1950s and 60s is now mostly passé – far
out has been replaced by awesome, and who knows what new such words
lurk in the wings. When slang does survive, it has ceased to be slang (which
might be the case with cool). Just look in early dictionaries, particularly at the