Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

by Keith Allan, Kate Burridge

Many words and expressions are viewed as 'taboo', such as those used to describe sex, our bodies and their functions, and those used to insult other people. This 2006 book provides a fascinating insight into taboo language and its role in everyday life. It looks at the ways we use language to be polite or impolite, politically correct or offensive, depending on whether we are 'sweet-talking', 'straight-talking' or being deliberately rude. Using a range of colourful examples, it shows how we use language playfully and figuratively in order to swear, to insult, and also to be politically correct, and what our motivations are for doing so. It goes on to examine the differences between institutionalized censorship and the ways individuals censor their own language. Lively and revealing, Forbidden Words will fascinate anyone who is interested in how and why we use and avoid taboos in daily conversation.

Genres: Linguistics, Language, Nonfiction

316 pages, Hardcover

First published August 31, 2006

Reviews

[Don · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have had a long interest in linguistics--especially the practices of swearing, euphemism, and politeness--so I picked up Forbidden Words with excitement. Unfortunately, while there are interesting nuggets of information, the book is rendered unreadable and untrustworthy by the authors' political and personal biases. To give a simple example, in the chapter on jargon, the authors write, "There is no convenient substitute for some jargon: to replace legalese defendant with a person against whom civil proceedings are brought is communicatively inefficient. Legal language is difficult because laws are complex, and not because lawyers try to obfuscate. We would argue the same for linguisticalese in the earlier quote..." (p. 67). But earlier, in the same chapter, in a discussion of bureaucratese, the authors claim, "The matters with which bureaucrats deal are mostly mundane and can be fully described and discussed in sixth-grade English. In order to augment their self-image, therefore, bureaucrats create synonyms for existing vocabulary using a Graeco-Latinate lexicon, seeking to obfuscate the commonplace and endow it with gravity; this achieves a double-whammy by mystifying and intimidating the clientele" (p. 62). Why is the jargon of linguists and lawyers necessary to avoid inefficient communication, but the jargon of bureaucrats is pretentious obfuscating nonsense? The authors never explain this value judgement, but they do give an example of what they call bureaucratese later in the book. In a discussion of a euphemism for parking spots, they write, "...they are probably dispreferred because they do not have the Latinate ring of bureaucratese. It is comparable with the upgrade of potholes to pavement deficiencies...." (p. 239). This is an example that is used throughout the book, but a little research and common sense shows that pavement deficiency is not used in civil engineering and government as a euphemism for pothole, but as a general term that refers to many different problems that can occur with roads and sidewalks, including cracking, roughness, poor drainage, and, yes, potholes. A pothole is a single type of pavement deficiency, and the term pavement deficiency is used for the same reasons that lawyers use the term defendant, to achieve efficient communication among specialists. Claiming or implying that pavement deficiency is a pompously bureaucratic euphemism for pothole is simply factually incorrect. These unsupported assumptions call into question the authors' credibility. The chapters of the book on political correctness, along with the sections dealing with AIDS and military language are nearly unreadable. I expected a rather academic work on taboo and language and instead received a political rant about the Religious Right's take-over of Australia and America. Even in the cases where I agreed with the authors' politics, the issues have been better debated and discussed elsewhere. They should have stuck with linguistics.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

I only picked this book up for research purposes. As a result, I read the entire chapter on sexual taboos, and then skipped around the book looking for information about language about homosexuality. So, take my opinion with a grain of salt, I haven't read the whole book. That said: this strikes me as overly-general, and it relies too much on unproven assumptions. Over and over, the authors will say that a particular euphemism was used, without giving any context to where, when, and why. It's hard to get a nuanced understanding of the words they talk about when the only discussion of them is a long list of euphemisms - many of which, I suspect, have been used in different ways over time and in different places - and there's a short set of generalizations made about them. It also makes it hard to assess where the authors are getting their information from. When you're talking about words that gay communities have reclaimed, there's a lot of tension between people who want to use the words for themselves and people who find them offensive in any context - just look at the debate within LGBT communities over whether or not we should be calling ourselves the 'queer community'. This book acknowledges none of that tension, instead taking one sub-culture's usage (or lack thereof) of any given word as universal within the LGBT community. There is some useful and interesting information in this book, but it's undercut by how general it is, and how incomplete the information feels.

[Bria · Rating 2 out of 5]

The thesis of this book is that people use euphemisms to talk about taboo topics, and that the same concept can have multiple words with different connotations. Yeah, that's about it, but I guess you learn some interesting factoids and see quite a few lists of words. I appreciate that they range their examples from language to language and culture to culture, even though they primarily focus on English (as they warn you they will do). I wonder a little bit about whether that has any significant effect on their claims - mainly I'm leery of the idea that humans are distressed by either not being in control, or of being reminded that they are merely animals. I guess they don't outright claim that all cultures have that issue, but it is presented as the explanation for a decent portion of taboo topics (death, disease, bodily functions), which most or all cultures taboo but in my mind I don't think all cultures are as uptight about being animals.

And although there's plenty of material to cover, the authors seem to repeat themselves a bit too much. The same examples are re-used in different chapters, and they follow the standard format of say what you're going to say - say it - say what you said. Every chapter is summarized - a real book report summary, no (or little) new information or synthesis. And then the final chapter just re-summarizes the entire book. Compare, for example, this passage from ch. 9:

"The word insanity derives from Latin in-sanus 'not-healthy'. It is now confined to 'mentally unsound' but originally had a much broader domain, encompassing all bodily organs and their functions. Today, even the word sane (without the negative prefix) has narrowed under the influence of insane to denote only a mental condition." (p 215)

With this part from the very next chapter, the end chapter:

"The word insanity derives from Latin in-sanus 'not-healthy' and originally had a much broader domain, encompassing all bodily organs and their functions; but once pressed into euphemistic service, it quickly narrowed to 'mentally unsound'. Today, even the word sane (without the negative prefix) has narrowed under the influence of insane to denote only a mental condition." (p 243)

This combined with an ever-so-slightly-too-much attempt to formalize their science, such as including figures, tables and graphs that do not help at all by being figures, tables, and graphs, made it a somewhat less enjoyable book than it could have been. But at least I learned the word 'firkytoodle'.

[Eli]

This book manages to make the technicalities of language both interesting and accessible to those not trained in linguistics (like me). I quote it in daily conversation not infrequently.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book about just what the title says. When it says censoring, though, it mostly means self-censoring. It spends a little bit of time on official censoring, but not much, which is good. One thing this book doesn't lack for is examples. In fact, sometimes, it's downfall is that it spends too much time giving examples and not enough time with analysis. The chapter on words relating to sex was particularly perplexing to me for it almost seemed in a different style from the rest. Usually, there was some analysis of the words and why they change and are tabooed, but this chapter didn't seem to do much but list off words. Still, I enjoyed it, especially the part where it talks about taboo words and their place in the brain, which is in a separate spot from where we store the rest of our language ability, which is one reason that curse words are so much more powerful. This is very much a book written by linguists, though, so if you want a light book, it might be better to look for another.

[Cody · Rating 3 out of 5]

laffin @ the old man review below this one ranting and raving about some stupid shit about pavement (not the band although that would be funny too). my main beef is that it's almost entirely descriptive and while its cool to get examples of rare cases where orthophemisms/euphemisms/dysphemisms (urine / weewee / piss) are contained w/in the same word depending on context, like Jesus Christ (louis ck talked about this too in episode of iremember, "jesus christ this is a big pumpkin") it doesn't plunge a whole lot deeper until way late. seriously did not need to read a chapter about food, then sex, then cannibalism, then other things, with millions of examples explaining same concept oh well

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ironic that other words could have been used both to title and in this book…