Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

74 Forbidden Words
Key:
Her scotches, long and slender
Reached to her kingdom come,
Her hobsons, low and husky
Made my newingtons go numb.
I took her for some Lillian Gish
Down at the chippy caff.
We squeezed into my jam-jar
And drove back to my gaff. 42
scotch [pegs] ‘legs’;
kingdom come ‘bum, fanny’;
Hobson’s [choice] ‘voice’;
Newington [Butts] ‘guts’;
Lillian Gish ‘fish’;
jam-jar ‘car’.
(Barker 1979: 21)
The primary function of most of the slang in ‘Cockney’s Lament’, from which
these verses are taken, is to amuse the reader, and very little of it is otherwise
euphemistic; nor is it dysphemistic, except perhaps to an extremely straitlaced
prude (the poem ends with her dropping her early doors). It is the
rhyming slang that creates a minor work of art from a mundane seduction
story.
Another distinguishing feature of slang is that it can usually be replaced
by standard language without loss of communicative efficiency, 43 whereas
the best jargon cannot. However, such a substitution will necessarily change
the connotations of the utterance or text and, consequently, the communicative
effect. You could describe someone as pickled, pissed or plastered, or
you could simply say they are drunk. On the other hand, as we said earlier,
many jargon expressions simply do not have viable alternatives – the art
historian’s skeuomorphy, the lawyer’s plaintiff and the cricketer’s man at
deep fine leg all fill a gap. Of course when drunk replaces pickled, pissed or
plastered, gone are the rhetorical effects conveyed by these slang expressions.
Speakers can use slang to deliberately express irreverence, i.e. to
deliberately flout social or linguistic conventions. Slang can also show
familiarity with what is being referred to, or at least familiarity with the
group that uses this term. To describe something as awes (¼ ‘awesome’) is
more than saying this thing is good; it has connotations that the conventional
language does not convey.
Swearing and cussing
Jargon does not ipso facto include swearing; although someone using jargon
may well swear. Slang also does not necessarily include swearing, but as a
matter of practice it often, and perhaps usually does. At least part of the
reason is that both slang and (profane) swearing are highly colloquial varieties
of language. Martin Joos identified five levels of formality. 44 In Figure 3.2,