Good Words, Bad Words

How the taboos of a language change, and what they say about its speakers

Obscenities are in scholarly focus. That’s the good news. The latest book to address this vital aspect of civilisation is Ralph Keyes’ Unmentionables, a study of the half spoken: euphemisms. What was once a sign of civility, it seems, is fast becoming a tool of doublespeak (‘Collateral damage’). That’s the bad news. ‘Much as we might like to think that our modes of expression involve a straight trajectory of opening up, shedding inhibitions and becoming more candid, that’s not the case,’ he writes, ‘The terms and targets of our euphemizing have simply shifted.’ If it’s death, disability, discrimination or disempowerment, you dare not speak its name. And if it invokes all of these (say, ‘nuclear’), you must cool its effect at the first oxymoronic opportunity (add ‘security’).

Just a generation ago, it was sexual references that had people dropping their jaws and covering their mouths in shock. If the famous eff word has been a special object of censorship, it’s largely because its versatility of usage lets it run amuck. But by and large, anything that’s charged too heavily with disgust, terror or lust has found itself either muffled or muzzled for causing offence. Yet, exactly what’s offensive and what’s not has always been in flux down the ages. ‘Queinte’ was a literary term in Chaucer’s UK that endured centuries of taboo after it was clipped to four letters—until its recent rescue by Eve Ensler’s idea of a monologue. In fact, ‘monosyllable’ too had an extended stint as a savvy reference to the same organ, only to end up in Francis Grose’s 1785 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. The Brazilian slang for the eff word has had the happiest fate so far: it’s in the title of a book on polite punctuation: Lynn Truss’ Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

That reminds me of Steven Pinker’s The Stuff Of Thought, whose chapter on ‘The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television’ offers fantastic insights. The reason expletives get people all worked up, he writes, is that they are invasive; they force themselves upon your thoughts and emotions in ways that could make you recoil. Roundabout expressions, in contrast, offer the fig-leaf of plausible deniability to the sayer and willful deafness to the hearer. Even then, what’s okay and what’s Oh-kay could differ. ‘Some things once said cannot be unsaid,’ writes the Harvard professor, citing a scene in When Harry Met Sally with Harry trying to withdraw a veiled proposition:

‘Sally: “You can’t take it back.”

Harry: “Why not?”

Sally: “Because it’s already out there!”

Harry: “Oh Jeez—now what are we supposed to do? Call the cops? ‘It’s already out there!’”

You can’t pin him down for his words. It liberates him of fear, in a way. And fear is primeval. The original cause of early man’s first mumbles, fear has had people fleeing to safer speech all through history. It explains why ‘hell’ was mellowed to ‘heck’, and why scary animals in olden days were never spoken of directly. ‘The Oraons of India…’ writes Keyes, ‘warily referred to tigers as long-tailed beings and snakes as ropes.’ Vedantists may well have scoffed at this sort of adhyaas (superimposition), but that’s easier done in Sanskrit than the jungle.

What liberates speech, ultimately, is an ability to discern rational from irrational fears. Peter Bernstein’s classic on risk, Against The Gods, mentions how a 1662 book called La Logique transformed European minds by making a simple but gutsy point: your fear of something should depend on both its peril and likelihood. It helped exorcise fears of the utterly unlikely. And it still remains relevant. Nuclear power can rationally be identified with a horror that outweighs the horror’s rarity, but take a look around, and you find that dummy dreads abound.

Even Pinker’s book appears aimed at having a strawman recognised particularly as such, as something too full of your own stuffing to pose any threat, with or without legs.

Well, hmmm… guess that leaves sexual talk free to shrug off qualms and untie tongues with effusive abandon.

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