Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Bad language? Jargon, slang, swearing and insult 85
free-to-air broadcasting services, were it not created by a quadriplegic who,
being one himself, is in a position to poke fun at the disabled.
Then there are terms of insult or disrespect, which invoke slurs on the
target’s character, such as arsehole/asshole, bag, bastard, battle-axe, biddy,
codger, crank, crone, cunt, dag, dick, dork, drip, dweeb, faggot, fogy, fuddyduddy,
fuss-budget, galoot, geezer, grommet, grot, grump, hag, nerd, pansy,
perv(ert), poof(ter), prick, queer, schmuck, scumbag, shirtlifter, sissy, slag,
slob, slut, SOB / son of a bitch, tramp, twat, wanker, wimp and witch. Many of
these derive from tabooed bodily organs, effluvia and sexual behaviours, of
course. The ascription He’s a devil is ambiguous between the dysphemism
‘He’s wicked’, and a term of approbation: ‘He’s a dare-devil’. Note that He’s
a little devil/demon is an affectionate description for, e.g. a naughty boy, with
only very slight disapprobation. There is an association with dare-devil, and
perhaps devil-may-care, both of which are essentially orthophemistic. The
phrase silly old NOUN is ageist and dysphemistic, and the insult is increased if
‘NOUN’ is a taboo term; thus Cedric’s a silly old fart implies that ‘Cedric talks
a lot of hot air’, i.e. the content of what he says is insubstantial and inconsequential.
One is reminded of the putdowns like He’s about as effective as a
fart in a windstorm!
Ritual insults such as occur in flyting and its successor, playing the dozens
seem to utilize the same categories as the kind of insults to outgroupers (or
people cast as outgroupers) that we have been discussing. The term flyting has
been around since before Beowulf, in the early tenth century. A Scandinavian
counterpart is the thirteenth-century Lokasenna, a poem in which the trickstergod
Loki taunts other gods and their wives. Scots poets engaged in mutual
flyting during the sixteenth century. Late nineteenth-century American
cowboys engaged in cussing contests, where a saddle would be awarded to
the most abusive participant. The dozens is the term used of the same behaviour
among African Americans today. In the nineteenth century, black field hands
used the verbal assault of the dozens against house slaves in lieu of physical
attack. 65 The name became attached to the practice of vilifying the target and
his/her relatives after an uncopyrighted and unpublished scatological blues
called The Dirty Dozen, which perhaps had twelve verses, each referring to a
different sex act. There are a number of conjectures on the source of the
term dozens: inferior slaves were sold in lots of twelve, so that the number
twelve came to connote ‘wretched, inferior’; a throw of unlucky twelve in
craps; a corruption of doesn’t as in at least my mother doesn’t; or from the
old verb dozen ‘make doze, stun, stupefy, daze’. The dozens is also called
bagging, capping, chopping, cracking, cutting, dissing, hiking, joning, joan-