Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Bad language? Jargon, slang, swearing and insult 75
Figure 3.2. Styles in English.
the boundary between each pair of styles is shown as fuzzy, and the casual
and intimate styles are bundled under the heading ‘colloquial’; sample address
forms are included for exemplification (the indicates avoidance of
any term of address).
Jargon takes the full gamut of styles, but slang and (profane) swearing are
restricted to colloquial styles; that is what makes exclamatives like those in
(1) so impossible by comparison with (2).
1. * Oh faeces! * Copulate off! * What a fornicate up! * That’s a load of testicles!
* Testicles! * This nut’s a real vagina to get off!
2. Oh shit! Fuck off! What a fuck up! That’s a load of bollocks! Bollocks!
This nut’s a real cunt to get off!
Any one person’s language may reflect a wide range between the extremes of
frozen and intimate style. Touchstone is playing with just two styles (formal
and colloquial) in the earlier quote from As You Like It (V.i.52):
Therefore you clown, abandon – which is in the vulgar ‘leave’ – the society – which in
the boorish is ‘company’ – of this female – which in the common is ‘woman’.
Style varies according to:
who we are and whom we are communicating with;
whether we are speaking or writing;
where we are and when the utterance takes place;
what we are talking about; and
how we feel about the whole situation.
If any one of these factors is changed, the style may well change accordingly.
For any given utterance, there exists a wide variety of possible stylistic
choices: not only lexical choices (although these are the most obvious), but
also choices of grammar, pronunciation and paralinguistic features like gesture
and facial expression. Usually, the speaker’s stylistic choices are tuned to
create just the impression s/he wants to create: where the speaker wants to
avoid offence, s/he will be orthophemistic or euphemistic and choose a style