Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

72 Forbidden Words
entries labelled unfit for general use. In Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of
1755, for example, we find the verb to colour described as ‘a low word, used
only in conversation’ and bamboozle as ‘a cant word not used in pure or in
grave writings’. A lot of Johnson’s entries were clearly contemporary slang.
Outdated slang is readily recognizable in the seventeenth-century description
of someone as a shite-a-bed scoundrel, aturdy gut, ablockish gruntnol and a
grouthead gnat-snapper. 33 Leafing through Grose’s late eighteenth-century
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 34 a majority of the slang terms seem
outdated. Some of this results from changes in technology: yesterday’s horse
thief, aprigger of prancers or a prad [‘horse’] napper is today’s car thief.
A star glazer stole window glass, but there is no call for that today. Even
when the topics for slang terms have hardly changed, the slang often has. In
early nineteenth-century London and Australian slang,
A woman was a bat, acrack, abunter, acase fro, cattle, a mort, aburick, ora
convenient. If she had a regular man, she was his natural or peculiar. If married, she
was an autem [‘church’] mott; if blonde, a bleached mott; if a very young prostitute,
almost a child, a kinchin [‘child’, cf. German kindchen] mott; if beautiful a rum
blowen, aewe, aflash piece of mutton. If she had gonorrhoea, she was a queer mort. 35
(Hughes 1987: 258)
Few of these terms are still in use. Eventually, slang expressions either stop
being slang by intruding into neutral style and become standard usage, or they
drop by the wayside.
A striking feature of slang is its playfulness. David Crystal demonstrates
the ubiquity and creativity of language play among ordinary language users,
and points out that ‘when children arrive in school, their linguistic life has
been one willingly given over to language play’. 36 It stays with people as they
grow up. The playfulness of slang is a characteristic shared with many
euphemisms and dysphemisms, but not with orthophemisms. Whether
speakers are creating names for new concepts, or simply adding to the names
of old concepts, metaphor, irony and sound symbolism are important forces
behind the new expressions. Take colloquial terms for drunkenness, such as
sloshed, soused, smashed, sozzled, soaked, stinking, stewed and other cooking
terms like steamed, boiled, cooked. The imagery here is buttressed by sound
association: most of these slang expressions for ‘drunk’ begin with s. Inebriated
and intoxicated are two of the very few elevated terms for ‘drunk’.
Verbal play is not solely the prerogative of the skilled writer. Much slang
demonstrates the poetic inventiveness of ordinary people: it reveals a folk
culture that has been paid too little attention by lexicographers, linguists and
literaticians, and, indeed, by the very folk who use them: you, me, our friends
and relatives. Rhyme, quasi-reduplication, alliteration, pleasing rhythms and
silly words give rise to euphemistic dysphemisms, or just plain dysphemisms.