Taboo Words And Euphemisms

Introduction

In one of his most perceptive essays, Otto Jespersen in 1929 explored the notion of “veiled language”. He noted that “round-about-expressions” were to be found in the popular speech of many nations, and he felt that they are “of interest to students of linguistic psychology as characteristic of one type of the popular mind”.

Students of language have long known that “taboo” presents many problems, not the least of which is that “taboo” ought to be self-defeating. Of a word is never spoken, it should die out in a generation; no doubt many words have been lost. But taboo is usually only partial – perhaps it exists to be broken.

The word “obscene”, in addition to its issue as a vehicle for expressing, predicting, and endorsing repugnance, shock or disgust and for referring to pornography, is used as a conventional label for a particular class of words. These words, which have their counterparts in virtually every human language, tend to cause great offense. Obscene utterances, however, unlike other offensive uses of language, shock the listener entirely because of the particular words they employ, quite apart from any other message they may be intended to convey. On virtue of certain linguistic conventions, well understood by all users of the language, these words, simply as words, have an inherent capacity to offend and shock, and in some cases even to fill with dread and horror.

Indeed one might even say that shocking others is what these words are for, how they are understood to function in a language. they are able to do this (sometimes useful) job because of word-taboos that have a powerful inhibiting force in the community, but not so powerful that they are never defied. The words acquire their strong expressive power in virtue of an almost paradoxical tension between powerful taboo and universal readiness to disobey. Not even the principle of legal moralism would justify a wholesale ban on the uttering of writing of obscene words – in sense of taboo any place, any time. The everyday obscenities of everyday people, as Burgess Johnson put it,

“result not so much from bad morals as from bad manners, added to a more superficial ailment which may be called a disease of the vocabulary. If we classify this with hoof-and-mouth disease or with chronic belching, we can approach the subject with less confusion of mind…”

The essence of bad manners is their offensiveness: words uttered in the solitude of one’s home or in the company of trusted intimates offend no one and thus are not bad manners. It have been supposed, at least among the upper classes, that it is part of the conventional sense of taboo words that they are linguistic devices for offending women, not men. Women, after all, were expected to be genteel and refined. Their place was at home, where they were insulated from the rough and ready manners of the man’s world. However plausible that understanding might have seemed in another day, its absurdity is manifest in the present time. Barriers between men and women have been crashing down as women by the millions take their place in the labor market. But this interpretation of the conventional use of taboo (obscene) words never was really plausible. Men have never been immune from the impact of tabooed words. In all-male settings the obscene terms were not just meaningless sounds. Perhaps they approached that point in military barracks , boiler rooms of ships, mines, foundries, and other places that never saw a woman, but there were always other contexts in which men too – even soldiers, sailors, and miners – could be shocked or offended by tabooed words.

Another aspect, taken seriously a century ago, when it was already quaint, is downright bizarre today. Some may once have thought that the utterance of a single obscene word in the presence of a lady could defile her. Sexual obscenities in particular were presumed to have a magic potency no less effective than once associated with profane oaths. A single exposure to the very sound of the word could make even the involuntary auditor (provided she was a female or a child) unclean. Naturally husbands and fathers in the possession of such dreadful magic were concerned to keep “their” women pure and innocent. To speak obscene, dirty, in the presence of a young lady then was an offense in the same category, though of lesser magnitude, as deflowering a virgin.

On the other hand, parents have a quite respectable interest in shaping the moral sensibilities of their own children. For example, even where pornography performances and materials may freely be presented to consenting adults, most parents would be outraged of the law did not make an exception for children. Very likely no parents would make pornographic works their textbook of choice in the sexual education of their offspring. Exposure of children to obscene words, on the other hand, has no important effect such on the child’s developing moral dispositions. Rather in a routine part of his or her language training.

Exposure to those words is a necessary link in learning what they mean and how they are used. After all, children have to learn the word in order to learn that it is “wicked”. The ideal of complete protection of their purity, if effectively achieved, would render the obscene words extinct in one generation, thus causing our descendants the bother of having to invent new ones. It is important that we learn that shock is a predictable response to obscene utterance in some contexts but not in others, so that we can avoid giving unnecessary offense while using techniques of expressing deep feelings, making colorful insults, ribald jokes, through apt employment of obscene words.

Today ads represent a concrete proof of the presence of a number of taboo issues that can be found everyday in contemporary Western society. Issues such as eroticism and sex, dirtiness, bodily functions, disease and bad language are dealt with on a daily basis, and ads are trustworthy witnesses to the way people feel about them. That is the reason why ads need to hide some issues in careful and ingenious manners, which can be foregrounded by a detailed study of their verbal, visual and audio elements.

This chapter refers to and comments on the main theories that try to analyse these and other taboos, their origin and ways of functioning, in order to bring further insights to the understanding of the taboo issues. The structure of this chapter is centred on a few of these theories, those that bring important insights for the area covered in this work. Each one of them considers one of the taboo areas studied:

(1) obstacles to the clear categorisation of the individual in given situations (symbolised by certain bodily functions and disease);

(2) defilement and pollution (visible in dirtiness and in bad language);

(3) threats to traditional social institutions (embodied in eroticism and sex). It is a fact that all these categories are related. It is also a fact that taboos for the individual are reflected in social life and individual transgressions affect the social tissue as well. The purpose in grouping taboos according to these broad categories was purely methodological.

CHAPTER I

Taboo – meaning

I.1 “Taboo” in early times

In its primary form, the concept of taboo, as described by the European explorers of the South Seas, corresponded to a somewhat nebulous notion of “something that should not be touched” – whether because of disgust or awe. In spite of the more or less exotic origin of the word, the semantic area it covers corresponds to realities and social concerns of communities present and past and, in fact, it has become rather comprehensive in its scope, in that it has stood for a large number of avoidance behaviours.

The customs that lie behind taboo represent neither a single institution nor a sociological problem. The word was used to describe many distinct practices, such as one’s right over objects, a royal minister’s power to select what crops were to be sown and farmed, and the relations of supreme chiefs to petty dignitaries ‘in terms of delegated interdiction rather than delegated authority’. The essential function of taboos was, in Steiner's view, that of narrowing down and localizing danger.

As a sort of preliminary and very simplified delimitation of the concept, taboo can be defined as “a set of attitudes towards dangerous situations”. A non-specialised dictionary definition of the word provides a few more clues as to its meaning and origins– a definition that will be further developed:

TABOO also spelled TABU, Tongan Tabu, Maori Tapu, the prohibition of an action or the use of an object based on ritualistic distinctions of them either as being sacred and consecrated or as being dangerous, unclean, and accursed. The term taboo is of Polynesian origin and was first noted by Captain James Cook during his visit to Tonga in 1771; he introduced the term into the English language, from which it achieved widespread currency. Taboos were most highly developed in the Polynesian societies of the South Pacific, but they have been present in virtually all cultures.

These danger-avoiding behaviours can be found in virtually every area of social activity.

Ads can provide valuable and updated information about the way society thinks and acts. If ads try to disguise the taboo charge of their products or if, for some reason, they evoke taboos when presenting them, it is because those taboos exist more or less consciously in the minds of readers and viewers and, therefore, can be successfully played upon. Advertising is always a handy and useful mirror if we want to reflect on the way we behave socially (Cook 1992: 5). The description of its most general characteristics can be found in the general definition below:

The techniques and practices used to bring products, services, opinions, or causes to public notice for the purpose of persuading the public to respond in a certain way toward what is advertised. Most advertising involves promoting a good that is for sale, but similar methods are used to encourage people to drive safely, to support various charities, or to vote for political candidates, among many other examples. In many countries advertising is the most important source of income for the media (e.g., newspapers, magazines, or television stations) through which it is conducted. In the noncommunist world advertising has become a large and important service industry.

The analysis of taboo in these implies the recourse to theories and concepts that belong to different areas. Among others, concepts from sociology and anthropology are necessary to narrow the definition of taboo. Some insights from the discipline of social and media studies are fundamental to the understanding of such a broad and pervasive subject as advertising. Finally, linguistics provides the tools for analysis of the strategies that make taboo available for interpretation.

Ads represent a concrete proof of the presence of a number of taboo issues that can be found everyday in contemporary Western society. Issues such as eroticism and sex, dirtiness, bodily functions, disease and bad language are dealt with on a daily basis, and ads are trustworthy witnesses to the way people feel about them. That is the reason why ads need to hide some issues in careful and ingenious manners, which can be foregrounded by a detailed study of their verbal, visual and audio elements.

I.2 The origins of the word

Often we find it very difficult to give a clear and systematic account of everyday things, ideas, actions and events that surround us. We just take them for granted. We rarely need to state in an accurate and articulate manner what they are really like. For instance, we all know what a game is. Yet, as the philosopher Wittgenstein showed, we find it very difficult to state explicitly what the simple word game means. The same is true of the term word. We use wo that make taboo available for interpretation.

Ads represent a concrete proof of the presence of a number of taboo issues that can be found everyday in contemporary Western society. Issues such as eroticism and sex, dirtiness, bodily functions, disease and bad language are dealt with on a daily basis, and ads are trustworthy witnesses to the way people feel about them. That is the reason why ads need to hide some issues in careful and ingenious manners, which can be foregrounded by a detailed study of their verbal, visual and audio elements.

I.2 The origins of the word

Often we find it very difficult to give a clear and systematic account of everyday things, ideas, actions and events that surround us. We just take them for granted. We rarely need to state in an accurate and articulate manner what they are really like. For instance, we all know what a game is. Yet, as the philosopher Wittgenstein showed, we find it very difficult to state explicitly what the simple word game means. The same is true of the term word. We use words all the time. We intuitively know what the words in our language are. Nevertheless most of us would be hard pushed to explain to anyone what kind of object a word is.

A standard definition of the word is found in a paper written in 1926 by the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield, one of the greatest linguists of the twentieth century. According to Bloomfield, 'a minimum free form is a word'. By this he meant that the word is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit that can be used on its own. It is a form that cannot be divided into any smaller units that can be used independently to convey meaning. For example child is a word. We cannot divide it up into smaller units that can convey meaning when they stand alone.

When the first navigators that reached Polynesia came across the word taboo (with slight variations in pronunciation in the different islands) its precise meaning eluded them. It is described by Captain Cook as “something mysterious”, or, not much more explicitly, as “a sort of religious interdiction” This incapacity to attribute an exact signification to the word was translated by a general feeling of mystification, amusement, and indulgence on the part of navigators for such primitive and exotic habits. These, for instance, allowed native women to wander around almost naked but strictly forbade them from sharing a meal with visiting strangers.

These impressions were discernible in most accounts of early visitors to set foot in the Polynesian Islands. The attempts to explain the boundaries of the concept usually stressed the word’s religious and secular connotations. Even during these first contacts, the importance of taboo in establishing social hierarchies was immediately noticed. Some of the early visitors went as far as elaborating long lists of taboo items they came across. This demonstrates both the strangeness felt towards such exotic customs and the omnipresence and importance accorded by natives to taboos in their social and religious lives.

In Polynesia, taboo presents a very close relationship with power. The power that a chief accumulated over the years was easily measured by the number of taboos he could decree, thus functioning also as a clear indicator of the standing of a given individual in the social hierarchy. Those placed higher up would have the right to impose taboos, whereas those at the bottom of the scale should respect that imposition. In a taboo-society like that of Polynesia, these impositions and prohibitions were a useful means of regulating matters of rank, personal property and ownership. It was thus a way of reinforcing the existing social structure. In this type of culture, taboos are, in themselves, important regulatory powers that affect different areas of life, which, in other societies, would be managed and sanctioned by other institutions.

It was through these accounts that the word was introduced into Europe in the18th and 19th century, where it rapidly lost its exotic edge and became a part of everyday language, as a synonym of “forbidden”. However, in its Polynesian origins, the word had a wider range of meaning, as it combined holy and forbidden, a concept that the Europeans cannot express in one single word. The understanding of this dual meaning is very often lacking in the theories that study taboo. The concept of taboo in Polynesia does not correspond alternatively to prohibited, sacred or defiled, as some dictionary definitions might tell us. Rather, it combines all of them, establishing a relationship between prohibition and sacredness, and making some kinds of impurity or defilement derive from that connection.

In fact, not all types of impurity constituted taboo, which makes this a very singular concept as to the specific significations it encompasses:

“(…) I prefer to stress the uniqueness of this semantic configuration, in which that which causes ritual impurity goes under the same name as all the contexts implying awe, obedience, abstention, or keeping of distance (…). The Polynesian concept is so surprising because it seems to lack the polarity which we associate not only with sacredness but with every highly charged notion”.

Taboo restrictions are distinct from religious or moral prohibitions. They are not based upon any divine ordinance, but may be said to impose themselves on their own account. They differ from moral prohibitions in that they fall into no system that declares quite generally that certain abstinences must be observed and gives reasons for that necessity. Taboo prohibitions have no grounds and are of unknown origin. Though they are unintelligible to us, to those who are dominated by them they are taken as a matter of course.

Wundt (1906, 308) describes taboo as the oldest human unwritten code of laws. It is generally supposed that taboo is older than gods and dates back to a period before any kind of religion existed.

“The objects of taboo are many: (i) direct taboos aim at:

(a) the protection of important persons-chiefs, priests, etc.-and things against harm;

(b) the safeguarding of the weak-women, children and common people generally-from the powerful mana (magical influence) of chiefs and priests;

(c) the provision against the dangers incurred by handling or coming in contact with corpses, by eating certain foods, etc.;

(d) the guarding the chief acts of life-birth, initiation, marriage and sexual functions, etc., against interference;

(e) the securing of human beings against the wrath or power of gods and spirits;

(f) the securing of unborn infants and young children, who stand in a specially sympathetic relation with one or both parents, from the consequences of certain actions, and more especially from the communication of qualities supposed to be derived from certain foods. (ii) Taboos are imposed in order to secure against thieves the property of an individual, his fields, tools, etc….”

The punishment for the violation of a taboo was no doubt originally left to an internal, automatic agency: the violated taboo itself took vengeance. When, at a later stage, ideas of gods and spirits arose, with whom taboo became associated, the penalty was expected to follow automatically from the divine power. In other cases, probably as a result of a further evolution of the concept, society itself took over the punishment of offenders, whose conduct had brought their fellows into danger. Thus the earliest human penal systems may be traced back to taboo.

Thus man's first systems of punishment are also connected with taboo. The violation of a taboo makes the offender himself taboo.

A peculiar power inherent in persons and ghosts, which can be transmitted from them to inanimate objects is regarded as the source of the taboo. It was thought that : "Persons or things which are regarded as taboo may be compared to objects charged with electricity; they are the seat of tremendous power which is transmissible by contact, and may be liberated with destructive effect if the organisms which provoke its discharge are too weak to resist it; the result of a violation of a taboo depends partly on the strength of the magical influence inherent in the taboo object or person, partly on the strength of the opposing mana of the violator of the taboo. Thus, kings and chiefs are possessed of great power, and it is death for their subjects to address them directly; but a minister or other person of greater mana than common, can approach them unharmed, and can in turn be approached by their inferiors without risk. . . . So, too, indirect taboos depend for their strength on the mana of him who opposes them; if it is a chief or a priest, they are more powerful than those imposed by a common person."

Temporary taboos attach themselves to certain conditions such as menstruation and child-bed, the status of the warrior before and after the expedition, the activities of fishing and of the chase, and similar activities. A general taboo may also be imposed upon a large district like an ecclesiastical interdict, and may then last for years. However, the term "taboo" includes all persons localities, objects and temporary conditions which are carriers or sources of this mysterious attribute. The prohibition derived from this attribute is also designated as taboo, and lastly taboo, in the literal sense, includes everything that is sacred, above the ordinary, and at the same time dangerous, unclean and mysterious.

Wundt states that the idea of taboo “includes all customs which express dread of particular objects connected with cultic ideas or of actions having reference to them.” On another occasion he says: "In accordance with the general sense of the word we understand by taboo every prohibition laid down in customs or manners or in expressly formulated laws, not to touch an object or to take it for one's own use, or to make use of certain proscribed words. . . ." Accordingly there would not be a single race or stage of culture which had escaped the injurious effects of taboo.

Wundt then shows why he finds it more practical to study the nature of taboo in the primitive states of Australian savages rather than in the higher culture of the Polynesian races. In the case of the Australians he divides taboo prohibitions into three classes according as they concern animals, persons or other objects. The animal taboo, which consists essentially of the taboo against killing and eating, forms the nucleus of Toteism. The taboo of the second class, which has human beings for its object, is of an essentially different nature. To begin with it is restricted to conditions which bring about an unusual situation in life for the person tabooed. Thus young men at the feast of initiation, women during menstruation and immediately after delivery, newly born children, the diseased and especially the dead, are all taboo. The constantly used property of any person, such as his clothes, tools and weapons, is permanently taboo for everybody else. In Australia the new name which a youth receives at his initiation into manhood becomes part of his most personal property, it is taboo and must be kept secret. The taboos of the third class, which apply to trees, plants, houses and localities, are more variable and seem only to follow the rule that anything which for any reason arouses dread or is mysterious, becomes subject to taboo.

Wundt himself has to acknowledge that the changes which taboo undergoes in the richer culture of the Polynesians and in the Malayan Archipelago are not very profound. The greater social differentiation of these races manifests itself in the fact that chiefs, kings and priests exercise an especially effective taboo and are themselves exposed to the strongest taboo compulsion. But the real sources of taboo lie deeper than in the interests of the privileged classes: “They begin where the most primitive and at the same time the most enduring human impulses have their origin, namely, in the fear of the effect of demonic powerg.” “The taboo, which originally was nothing more than the objectified fear of the demonic power thought to be concealed in the tabooed object, forbids the irritation of this power and demands the placation of the demon whenever the taboo has been knowingly or unknowingly violated.”

The taboo then gradually became an autonomous power which has detached itself from demonism. It becomes the compulsion of custom and tradition and finally of the law. “But the commandment concealed behind taboo prohibitions which differ materially according to place and time, had originally the meaning: Beware of the wrath of the demons.”

Wundt therefore teaches that taboo is the expression and evolution of the belief of primitive races in demonic powers, and that later taboo has dissociated itself from this origin and has remained a power simply because it was one by virtue of a kind of a psychic persistence and in this manner it became the root of our customs and laws. As little as one can object to the first part of this statement I feel, however, that I am only voicing the impression of many of my readers if I call Wundt's explanation disappointing. Wundt's explanation is far from going back to the sources of taboo concepts or to their deepest roots. For neither fear nor demons can be accepted in psychology as finalities defying any further deduction. It would be different if demons really existed; but we know that, like gods, they are only the product of the psychic powers of man; they have been created from and out of something.

Wundt also expresses a number of important though not altogether clear opinions about the double meaning of taboo. According to him the division between sacred and unclean does not yet exist in the first primitive stages of taboo. For this reason these conceptions entirely lack the significance which they could only acquire later on when they came to be contrasted. The animal, person, or place on which there is a taboo is demonic, that is, not sacred and therefore not yet, in the later sense, unclean. The expression taboo is particularly suitable for this undifferentiated and intermediate meaning of the demonic, in the sense of something which may not be touched, since it emphasizes a characteristic which finally adheres both to what is sacred and to the unclean, namely, the dread of contact. But the fact that this important characteristic is permanently held in common points to the existence of an original agreement here between these two spheres which gave way to a differentiation only as the result of further conditions through which both finally developed into opposites.

The belief associated with the original taboo, according to which a demonic power concealed in the object avenges the touching of it or its forbidden use by bewitching the offender was still an entirely objectified fear. This had not yet separated into the two forms which it assumed at a more developed stage, namely, awe and aversion.

To summarize the taboo subject, we saw that taboo is a very primitive prohibition imposed from without (by an authority) and directed against the strongest desires of man. The desire to violate it continues in the unconscious; persons who obey the taboo have an ambivalent feeling toward what is affected by the taboo. The magic power attributed to taboo goes back to its ability to lead man into temptation; it behaves like a contagion, because the example is contagious, and because the prohibited desire becomes displacing in the unconscious upon something else.

I.3 Recalling taboo and nontaboo words

People remember emotional taboo words better than neutral words. It is well known that words that are processed at a deep (semantic) level are recalled better than words processed at a shallow (purely visual) level. To determine how depth of processing influences recall of emotional and taboo words, a level of processing paradigm was used. Two experiments demonstrated that taboo and emotional words benefit less from deep processing than do neutral words.

Examples from everyday life provide ample evidence that information and events associated with strong emotions and remembered better than experiences that lack emotional depth. Taboo words represent a class of emotionally arousing references with respect to body products, sexual acts, or racial insults, vulgarity, slang. Emotionally arousing words are remembered better than non arousing words, and taboo words show the most exaggerated version of this effect. One compelling reason for superior recall of taboo words is based on their emotional qualities. Taboo words have uniquely strong connotative meanings; in fact, their primary meaning is connotative, which is usual relative to nontaboo words, which are more denotative. Many taboo words have both negative valence (bad words) and arousal, which can be contrasted to words as sorrow, which have negative valence but are nor arousing.

Taboo word recall rates should be less influenced by processing level than neutral words or valenced ( positive or negative) words. Taboo word recall should be better than recall of nontaboo words, exhibiting the emotionality effect regardless of encoding strategy.

Another explanation for better memory of taboo words related to nontaboo words is that taboo words may be encoded more efficiently than nontaboo words. A level of processing (LOP) model proposed by Craik and Lockhart (1972) viewed memory for verbal material as a function of encoding. It could be the case that taboo words, regardless of orienting task, attract a deeper level of processing than nontaboo words and therefore are remembered better.

CHAPTER 2

Categorization of Taboo

II.1 Taboos about the categorization of the individuals in given situations

Several great thinkers of the Victorian period (or its equivalent throughout Europe) developed theories concerning the problems raised by taboo and avoidance strategies. It is possible that this interest was due to some characteristics of the Victorian age itself, namely to the fact that this was also an intensely taboo-prone society, where a number of avoidance behaviours were positively valued and were also strictly related to well-compartmentalised social classes .The observance of these avoidances was thus a means of showing inclusion in a given social stratum, which was also marked by the usage of a restricted range of vocabulary. Some words and expressions would become taboo for some people, while they were employed by people from different social classes.

Two Victorian thinkers, W. Robertson Smith and Sir James Frazer made important contributions for the further understanding of taboo and its functioning. They were also responsible for the consecration of a biased perspective in anthropological and religious studies, which prevailed for a considerable number of years, i.e. a rigid division between “the primitives” and “the civilised” in terms of conceptualising ability and type of spirituality. This view had some followers and traces of it can still be found in Levy-Bruhl’s writings on primitive thought a number of years later.

Robertson Smith’s theory of taboo is, above all, a theory of the holy. Therefore, he establishes a distinction between what is spiritual and what is mere superstition. In his studies of the Semitic religion, he detected the coexistence of a highly spiritual (and highly valued) spiritual system with more lowly forms of fear of the supernatural, a situation he explains by means of the theory of “survivals”. These survivals would be leftovers from primitive times, i.e. taboos.

Taboo appears as a useful category for Robertson Smith, in that it allows the differentiation of what is high and worthy of study from what is superstition. There is a coexistence of:

(1) taboos “that exactly correspond to the rules of holiness” – located in the domain of the religion proper – and,

(2) taboos that have to do with fear of contagion by uncleanness. These would have to do, for instance, with isolating women during menstruation or after childbirth, or fearing contact with someone who touched an ill person or a dead body. Robertson Smith points out that, in savage societies, the distinction between taboos of holiness and taboos of uncleanness is often blurred and vague. On the other hand, a society where a differentiation is established between the two types possesses a higher degree of moral awareness and sophistication. They have learned to distinguish between the holy and the unclean and to value the former more. Douglas summarises this dichotomy in the following manner:

In this way a criterion was produced for classing religions as advanced or as primitive. If primitive, then rules of holiness and rules of uncleanness were undistinguishable; if advanced then rules of uncleanness disappeared from religion. They were relegated to the kitchen and bathroom and to municipal sanitation, nothing to do with religion. The less uncleanness was concerned with physical conditions and the more it signified a spiritual state of unworthiness, so much more decisively could the religion in question be recognised as advanced.

Robertson Smith’s theories correspond to a feeling of superiority towards the more primitive cultures. They are called so because Western culture considers them several steps behind in terms of evolution. This attitude appears, very often, disguised as a benevolence that verges on the patronising. Frazer would be an example of such short sightedness, which prevents him and his followers from perceiving that many “primitive” ways of reasoning and behaviours are rather close to ours (Magli 2001: 117).

Robertson Smith’s theory of the holy was a decisive influence to the theological and sociological reflections that followed. However, his theory of taboo presents some weak points. Mainly, these have to do with the moral valuation of the attitudes that underlie the “more primitive” taboos that, according to Robertson Smith, persist alongside the strictly religious ones. This approach – and taking into consideration the state of anthropological research at the time Robertson Smith was writing– leads him to postulate the existence of these two different types of taboo. One of them belongs to the area of the correct spirituality.

The other consists of elements of a “less pure” spirituality. This theory can easily be questioned, seeing that “just as the refined and advanced harbour the primitive in their midst, so primitive systems may not be without some supposedly refined and advanced values.”. We could say that, in this work, a two way system is postulated, where inputs from what is primitive are essential to what is more sophisticated – or rather, that distinction is blurred. These are, in fact, two different but complementary ways of viewing reality.

Our common sense tells us that “we”, the civilised ones, are very distant from primitive fears and superstitions. Spirituality and morality are institutionalised by religion, and uncleanness, pollution and fears of contagion are effectively taken care of with a wide number of cleansing, hygienic and medical products. Therefore, for us, as for Robertson Smith, spirituality and moral values are totally apart from “lowly” matters. According to him, this is as it should be, for in this separation lies the mark of an advanced society.

When moral valuation is detached from polluting issues, these issues would seem to lose their taboo charge, and become simple, everyday matters that can be easily dealt with – and no feelings involved. However, as this analysis will demonstrate, this is not exactly how it works. In many ads from this selection, it is possible to detect a more or less explicit (moral) evaluation of the type of pollution and impurity involved. This accounts, on the one hand, for the need for subterfuge and diverting strategies when discussing it. On the other hand, it explains the moral objections that can (and frequently are) raised when ads deliberately resort to special types of taboo in order to attain their purposes.

Levy-Bruhl approaches the matter of primitive mentality primarily in terms of collective thinking, an angle that effectively contributes to the better understanding of taboo issues and also one that can help clarify the central sociological issues about taboo mentioned above. Levy-Bruhl’s main interest was the study of the social contexts where taboos appear, which he divides into two major groups. There are those that have to do with transgression of taboos and those that are related to defilement and purity issues. When analysing the transgression group, Levy-Bruhl establishes taboo as the means to reintroduce normality after the breach has occurred. Taboo has thus an important social role, that of establishing limits to certain behaviours but also providing the mental apparatus that will allow for the transgression to be punished and things to be put right again. If we compare contexts and civilizations, this is a very different way of punishing transgression from our own. However, Levy-Bruhl excessively widens the gap between them and us, and places himself in an easily criticisable position.

The reading of taboo in terms of protection from danger in a number of social situations is, as we have seen, especially relevant to this analysis of taboo. Danger and some degree of risk are present in every social exchange, in Polynesia and in contemporary society alike, and individuals must have some sort of insurance against it. Taboo played that role in the past, and still plays it today.

II.2 Taboos about dirtiness and bad language

Taboo is a proscription of behavior that affects everyday life. Taboos that we consider in the course of the subject include:

Bodies and their effluvia (sweat, snot, faeces, etc.)

The organs and acts of sex, micturition and defecation;

Diseases, death and killing;

Naming, addressing, touching and viewing persons and sacred beings, objects and places;

Dirtiness, as a form of pollution, is something to be avoided. Its functioning is very similar to the previous taboo with regard to the possibilities of defilement involved in issues such as illness and bodily functions. It questions the way things are organised and interferes with our sense of propriety: “Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organise the environment.”. Although many ads for household cleaning products (to mention but one example of the most recurrent type of ads on TV) usually stress the item’s increased hygienic power, it is not really the fear of bacteria that is at stake:

In chasing dirt, in papering, decorating, tidying we are not governed by anxiety to escape disease, but are positively re-ordering our environment, making it conform to an idea. There is nothing fearful or unreasoning in our dirt-avoidance: it is a creative movement, an attempt to relate form to function, to make unity of experience.

Taboos about bad language have an identical protective role. Sanctions for its use are also the same: “A lot of people react in about the same way to dirt, untidiness, immorality and bad language, with the same faces, frowns and wrinkling up of the nose.” (Andersson and Trudgill “Bad Language”, 1990). Dirty words can evoke dirty subjects, thus making them present and real. They are capable of dirtying sacred subjects and they can be used to insult others (Andersson and Trudgill, 1990). Their disruptive possibilities are several, in that they

(1) bring to the public sphere matters that should be kept private, namely sexual issues;

(2) they mix what should be only spiritual with what, for us, is merely lowly and material, a distinction that is, a commonsensical one for contemporary civilisation. Finally,

(3) they debase the essential humanity of the individual by the attribution of animal characteristics, as often happens with insults. In all these situations, bad language constitutes a threat to the proper classification of individuals inside the group or to the functioning of the community itself.

It is a fact that people still react strongly to some bad language. If religion and sacredness are no longer extremely sensitive areas, dirty words about sexuality are still capable of causing strong offence.

II.3 Taboos about threats to traditional social institutions

Freud’s writings on the subject of taboo – most specifically, those reflections that appear in section two from his work “Totem and Taboo” (1938) – present some points of special relevance for this analysis. They explain why taboos that help regulate social life, like the “proper behaviour” ones, can be turned upside down and be used as an effective advertising strategy.

In the second essay of “Totem and Taboo” (1938), “Taboo and the Ambivalence of Emotions”, Freud begins by looking into the origins of the word and tries to find a comprehensive expression that translates the concept in order to make it understandable for contemporary readers. “Holy dread” would sum up both aspects of taboo, that of sacredness and that of uncleanness. These two areas, for Freud, correspond to two entirely separate branches that coexist under the name of taboo. In this assumption, he is following in the footsteps of the other thinkers that preceded him and whose opinions have already been reviewed in this chapter. However, he does not establish this division into two words solely due to “contamination” from the contemporary linguistic praxis, where there seems to be lacking a concept that encompasses both meanings (sacredness and uncleanness) in one word – as in the Polynesian “taboo”.

This division would correspond, in Freud as in other thinkers, to two different stages in human societies. In the initial stage, taboo meant unclean, uncanny, dangerous and forbidden. The later stage identifies taboo with what is sacred and consecrated. This passage from “fear of the unknown” to “respect for a divinity” would mean a step further in the evolution of mankind, in that there would be some sort of domestication of instincts and a channelling of all that raw material into the proper grooves. If we postulate that taboo is one thing or the other, but not both at the same time, we are stripping the concept of its complexity and possibilities of meaning. Consequently, we are making it the ideal ground for primitive minds that, from the Victorian point of view, seem to thrive on superstition and inexplicable interdictions that only marginally could have anything to do with civilised religion.

However, this notion that taboo dates from a pre-religious age of man, and is a phenomenon apart from other types of religion proper is one that, in Freud, is directly connected to one of the main tenets of his psychoanalytical theory (Steiner [1956] 1999: 201). This theory is, according to Freudian reasoning, the starting point for the analysis of several psychoanalytical phenomena. It is, thus, logical that it should function as the cornerstone of Freud’s investigations on the subject of taboo. Freud criticises Wundt’s identification of the belief in the powers of demons as the earliest possible origin of taboo, objecting that demons are also creations of the human mind. However, he seems to share his conviction as to an evolution of the concept of taboo that would accompany the evolution of mankind.

Taboo is useful for the understanding of one of the areas that tells us more about the workings of the human mind, i.e. that of neurosis. According to Freud, both phenomena present some similarities with each other, which makes it a valuable and fruitful approximation, even if the similar features are to be found merely at surface level and not in the causes of both.

A possible justification for the foregrounding of taboo – when, usually, taboo subjects are to be avoided – could be that taboos correspond to strong inner desires that have to be controlled by some repressive force if social order is to be maintained. “The basis of taboo is a forbidden action for which there exists a strong inclination in the unconscious.” In fact, and taking into account the distance that separates the more general character of the statement above from the situation where it will be applied, it could be used to describe the way these ads work for their target audience and the reaction they usually cause in the more traditionally-minded sectors of the public.

This prohibited desire caused by certain types of taboo – for instance, evocation of eroticism or sex – accounts for its use in ads, always on the lookout for the most efficient means of attracting the audience’s attention. The target audience intended are usually those who are capable of recognising the taboo involved, capable of anticipating the feelings its depiction or invocation will arise in publics other than the target audience and, finally, capable of enjoying the risk of transgression – even if it is being done vicariously.

However, if the parallelism established by Freud enlightens an aspect that is present in some types of taboo, it still leaves out a number of others that cannot be accounted for in this manner. Therefore, this narrowing down of the definition makes it applicable only to a part of the present data, leaving out other important and widespread taboos – such as menstruation, but also certain bodily functions, disease or dirtiness, whose status of taboo cannot reasonably be explained in terms of hidden repressed desires.

II.4 A working definition of taboo

It is evident that we are faced with a hard task when trying to find a proper and comprehensive definition of the concept. This happens mainly because the word has been used to describe different phenomena.

As we can see, the possible connotations of the word embrace a wide range of social situations, which cannot be dealt with as if we were discussing a single phenomenon.

Therefore, as in any other attempt to analyse a given sociological mechanism, it will be necessary here to settle on a definition of the concept that is attuned to its consensual meaning but also one that will encompass the specific situations.

After reviewing the above theories on taboo, it is now possible to refine the explanation as to the way taboo acts. Steiner summarises it in the following manner:

…until taboos are involved, a danger is not defined and cannot be coped with by institutionalised behaviour…. Danger is narrowed down by taboo. A situation is regarded as dangerous: very well, but the danger may be a socially unformulated threat. Taboo gives notice that danger lies not in the whole situation, but only in certain specified actions concerning it. These actions, these danger spots, are more deadly than the danger of the situations as a whole, for the whole situation can be rendered free from danger by dealing with or, rather, avoiding the specified danger spots completely…. The narrowing down and localisation of danger is the function of taboo of which we are now speaking. The dangerous situation is then defined in terms of such localisation, which in its turn is meaningless without abstentive behaviour.

Other taboos also signal risks for the community. Taboos related with marginality and border crossing can be understood in terms of a situation where the individual has no definite social standing (women during childbirth or menstruation, or unborn babies), which implies a problem of how to attribute these individuals a clear social standing. Whatever has to do with bodily transitions seems to pose the same kind of non-definition. Taboo covers all these areas as a protective cloak against the dangers that might occur in the above processes and the establishment of taboos provides us with the tools to deal with these dangers. Only after identifying them, can we deal with them, either by rejecting them totally or re-integrating them in organised society.

This yearning for perfection and completeness can be equated with the ideal wholeness of God, which humans try to emulate: “To be holy is to be whole, to be one; holiness is unity, integrity, perfection of the individual and of the kind.” Thus, this idea of sacredness is always present – even if in our very secular manner, where the sacred appears to belong in a very different sphere to that of our daily existence. It was in order to maintain this sacredness that taboos were instituted; and still are, even today.

This is how taboos function for individuals and in the everyday life of society. It would also be important to try to explain how they can function in advertising. Tentatively, we might say that

(1) taboos that correspond to ‘hidden desires’ constitute a useful weapon in this area, in that ads can appeal to the taboo’s pleasant side in order to invoke positive associations with the product or service advertised. In this case, even the taboo’s negative side can be put to good use in some ads that cash in on a rebellious and outrageous attitude on the part of their target audience. This would account for the foregrounding of taboo. On the other hand,

(2) taboos that only indicate danger spots but have no pleasant connotations constitute a problem for advertising, because their charge is primarily negative. In these cases, the function of the ad is usually to alleviate the taboo charge by concentrating on positive aspects of the after-use of the product. The solution is very often that of concentrating on the post-taboo, i.e. socially reintegrating capacities of the item advertised.

After this reflection on the functions of taboo in society and, more specifically, in advertising – a reflection which will be further developed over the next chapters– let us now settle on a definition of taboo that can function as an instrument of analysis of the data proposed for analysis. For the purposes of this book, ‘taboo’ corresponds to a number of restrictions that regulate some areas of social life, and that demand avoidance behaviour because

(1) the situation is dangerous for the individual

(2) that danger could contaminate others. The danger involved usually corresponds to a threat to the established pattern of society, which tries to reproduce in its structure and in the behaviour of individuals an idea of wholeness and completeness. However, this connection to the sacred is not clearly visible in most cases, and sanctions for infringement of these taboos are apparently light and profane: embarrassment, private guilt, social criticism and social pressure – reactions that might have more to do with the sacred than might be expected at first.

CHAPTER 3

Contemporary taboos

III.1 Taboo as an element in the communication strategy

From the earlier print ads where the facts about the product were the most important USPs to the most recent ads by Benetton where the product is not even shown, a number of taboo issues have been dealt with, avoided, indirectly mentioned or, in specific cases, foregrounded in order to benefit the image of the product or service in the minds of their target audience. When advertisers take upon themselves to discuss social problems rather than the superiority of their products when compared with others that are similar to them, taboo issues are bound to be mentioned much more often, and with the aim of increasing social awareness. This process brings to commercial ads shock approaches borrowed from charity ads. Reference to taboo can be deliberate and, when it happens, it fulfils an important function as to the type of connotations that the advertiser wants the viewer to associate with the product. In this situation, the taboos invoked are usually those connected with sex and eroticism, which bring to an innocuous product such as a perfume or a car an aura of “safe” – because virtual – transgression and defiance of established social institutions such as marriage or religion. These taboos would then be the ones for which there is an element of desire or pleasure in the mind of the individual.

Some products related with very specific issues present a serious problem for the advertiser because they deal with traditional taboos. Even more than with menstruation, that is the case with condoms, especially after the advent of AIDS. This disease, usually (and erroneously) seen as a synonym of immediate death, complicates the advertising of the only artefact that can prevent the infection during sexual intercourse, thereby adding to the product’s taboo of connection with illicit sex. This connotation is analysed in a study on the evolution in the form of advertising of a product that presents a special situation with respect to its taboo readings, which is reflected in the uncomfortable relationship advertising has always had with it. The hint of libertinage associated with the product in the 18th century was visible in the euphemisms people used to refer it. The widespread advertising of condoms in the press from the 60s to the 90s was subject to decency rules, a fact that is telling as to the heavy taboo charge involved. By then, the product was being marketed mainly as a contraceptive method. However, the pill, which began to be widely used in the 70s, was gradually replacing condoms, mainly because of the simplicity of its use and increased reliability. Contemporary ads for condoms try to rehabilitate them from negative connotations of obtrusiveness and awkwardness, in order to transform them into something desirable and fashionable. Now, apart from mentioning its unique abilities as a protection from contagion, ads have to be advertised in terms of enhancer of sexual pleasure, a fact that forces taboo ads to talk openly about sexual taboos:

Condom advertising, therefore, in common with tobacco advertising, runs counter to the promotion of most other products, exhorting us to think seriously about the implications of corporeal pleasure and confronting us with our own mortality.

This is a common strategy in television ads, especially when the targets are young people. Both strategies are widely used for sexualising the condom and render the inevitable references to disease more positive. The emphasis is usually on the living quality one can have (with the condom), and not so much on the certainty of dying.

III.2 “Hard” words

The taboo experts found its influence in the most curious places, such as the following transcript of the cockpit voice recordings in a 1989 airline crash in Iowa: “We’re going to have to ditch this son of a ****…”. Even in the context of disaster and imminent death, when one could argue that swearing might actually be completely appropriate, the squeamishness persists.

The fact that serious word people have been so hesitant to take the plunge perhaps carries a message for the would-be researcher. Part of the problem is that is hard to write about “shit, fuck, cunt”, and their relatives without using the words themselves. But this has been done. In 1948 Burges Johnson succeeded in writing a book on swearing, rather romantically titled “The Lost Art of Profanity”, without once mentioning any of the naughty words.

An interesting aspect is that we have urologists, proctologists and gynecologists, who aren’t afraid to put their particular “-ist” next to their name on a plaque. We don’t ban snails or other slimy creatures from texts on biology simply because they are unsightly.

Moreover, as with many lay or folk notions, beliefs about swearing are riddled with myth. A major one is that swearing is destructive. Take for instance, the Cuss Control Academy, a North American institute of nonreligious people dedicated to raising public awareness about the negative impact of swearing. These people have nothing to say about swearing: It makes you look bad; it’s a social ill; and corrupts the language. The institute runs workshops for those keen to reduce their use of profanity, vulgarity, obscenity, and offensive slang. For a reasonable fee, you can learn “the ten tips for taming the tongue” and have the opportunity to practice them in pleasant surroundings where you can feel safe an understood, while knowing that you are improving both yourself and society.

James V. O’Connor, president of the Cuss Control Academy, is so concerned about the effect on children of their parents’ swearing that this book “Cuss Control: The Complete Book on How to Curb Your Cursing” was written with the primary goal of getting parents to clean up their vocabulary. He argues that we swear because we’re lazy, it’s easy and we mistakenly think it’s okay. Our children, growing up in a cursing culture, hear it everywhere – at home , in the street, on television, at the movies – and they might be forgiven for failing to understand why it’s “wrong”. For them, “Don’t cuss” may well be just another rule to be broken. O’Connor then goes on to contradict himself by claiming that while kids might take up swearing in rebellion, much as they take smoking, the habit can become ingrained.

It’s not only collectives of private citizens that are speaking out, often ignorantly, about swearing. In December 2003 California legislator Doug Ose became very upset over the fact that the rock star Bono had used a vulgarity (the offensive phrase was “fucking brilliant”) on live TV.

In 2003 the Macquarie Dictionary’s Sue Butler was being interviewed on an Australian television morning show. The matter being discussed was the acceptability of calling someone a “boofhead” in public. Butler explained that while the word “boofhead” was more affectionate than aggressive, it was really the act of calling someone a “something” , whether “boofhead” or “fuckwit”; the interview was terminated, and the channel subsequently issued an apology.

The topic of swearinf generates extreme opinions. Writing for the British Daily Mirror, Melanie Philips abhors and condemns swearing as “the sickness in society”:

“We live…in an age defined by the smashing of taboos. It’s all part of the assault on bourgeois codes of behaviour, on the suburban, the respectable. But as taboos get smashed, new ones…emerge…. So the frontiers of shockability get pushed ever outwards…. Laddishness is the new black.”

For Philips, profanity “embodies an absence of self restraint”, and its increasing casualization bespeaks an erosion of public values and consideration for others. Like the allegedly falling standards in literacy, swearing is becoming a universal scapegoat – it’s the symptom, cause, and outcome of most of the evils of the new millennium .

On the other hand, Philips’s extreme position can be contrasted with a more general tolerance toward swearing. A young student journalist researching modern swearing suggested that new tolerance may be the outcome of the “ tricke-down effects of post-modernity destroying the wall between high culture and low culture, pushing the words traditionally occupying the vocabulary of the uneducated into mainstream media, politics and entertainment.” The softening social attitude of the public toward swear words is a symptom of a general lightening up. People are realizing that swearing does not spell the end of civilization, that everyone does it at the some time, that we all abuse an uncooperative computer or laugh at a raunchy joke at the bar.

Talking about swearing can stimulate a great deal of hilarity, a fact well known by comedians , who use it to their advantage. There must be a basic handbook for wannabe stand-ups: When in doubt or in need of a quick laugh, dip into the toilet humor or throw in a few “fucks”. People laugh, almost by reflex. It’s the result of the flouting of a taboo. The comic is allowed to say it, and we’re allowed to laugh. It’s a ritual. Everyone goes home feeling better for the laughter. Take for instance, George Carlin’s recital of his infamous list of seven major words you can say in television. Audience is delighted in hearing Carlin say “shit, piss, fuck, tits…”.

There are two potential points of confusion when it comes to understanding and talking about foul language. One has to do with the words used that commonly constitute “swearing”. The other has to do with how we refer to “swearing”.

The first point of confusion arises from the form-function relationship of swearing terms. The fact is that there are more swearing functions to perform than there are swear words to use; the second potential point of confusion concerns the meta-language of swearing.

Take the word “swear”, for example, which itself has two very different meanings. There’s the swearing you do in court when you promise to tell the truth, and there is the different swearing you do at home when you get annoyed with different facts. We talk about “swearing”, “cursing”, and using “bad language”, and the meanings differ even while, confusingly, the words we use are the same or similar. We commonly interchange “foul” language with “rude”, “vulgar” and “obscene”. And these words themselves splinter off into separate submeanings – as does “rude”, which can mean impolite in the sense of not displaying the requisite amount of respect, or it can mean using an inappropriate word for a particular context. Sometimes the words used to talk about swearing are interchangeable, but sometimes they’re not. Almost always, they’re being used loosely.

The offense principle, cannot justify the criminal prohibition of the bare utterance of obscenities in public places even when they are used intentionally to cause offense. The single mosquito bite is simply too trivial a thing. A swarm of mosquitoes, on the other hand, biting continuously, is quite another thing.

It remains to consider another form of “intrusion” into the privacy of the home, that which comes over the air waves and appears on our television and radio sets. Normally, it would be absurd to think of television and radio as :intrusions:, since we voluntarily choose to install the receiving units in the first place, to turn them on, and to dial a particular channel. Moreover, we always change the channel, turn off the set, or remove it from our homes. Taboo words might yet be communicated to us, but our offended reaction need only be the instantaneous transient kind caused by momentary exposure. Unlike the response to obscene telephone calls, it will contain no element of fearful anxiety, and mo expectation of prolonged or repeated occurrence despite our best preventive efforts.

Chapter 4

Euphemisms

IV.1 Notions about English Vocabulary

English is more than just the linguistic system. It is also a language used by all sorts of people in all sorts of situations. How people use the language – whoever or whatever they are – depends on what purposes they are pursuing and who they are communicating with. This includes questions of medium, style, purpose, addressee, subject matter and more. English is used by the young and the old, by women and by men, by the rich and the poor, by people whose skin colour is black, brown, yellow, red or white, by illiterates and the highly educated, and so on.

There is little explicit agreement about just how Standard English should be regarded. Almost everyone who works with English assumes at least implicitly that it exists, but the descriptions made of I – for example, in dictionaries and grammar books, to say nothing of manuals of style – indicate that there is a certain amount of diversity in people's ideas about standard English. A standard language is used as a model in the speech community at large.

Academics and other intellectuals often find themselves on the back foot in relation to matters that are the subject of public debate because the concepts, the framework and the moral assumptions that circulate in popular discussions are unacceptable. Not so Peter Sutton, whose keynote address at the Australian Anthropology Society conference in 2000 on violence in Indigenous communities was published, paraphrased and reproduced, and became an authoritative contribution to public debate.

The vocabulary of English is not an unchanging list of words. New words enter the language every day, and words cease to be used. The two sources of new words are borrowing and word-creation. In fields of higher learning, like the life sciences, physical sciences, medicine, law, and the social sciences, English has usually borrowed words from other languages to get new words to cover new concepts or new material or abstract phenomena. Words referring to notions and objects specific to other cultures are often borrowed wholesale. We may borrow a word as a whole, or just its central parts (the roots).

The vocabulary of the English language is conveniently recorded in dictionaries, of which the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1989; abbreviated as OED2 in the following) is the most recent and comprehensive. Although many people think it the greatest dictionary in the world, reviewers have no difficulty in pointing to words and phrases that are missing. Linguists draw a distinction between dictionaries, which are only incomplete recordings of the English vocabulary, and its total word stock, which they refer to as its lexis or lexicon.

Cuss, cussing – a term from American English that means “swearing” on the general sense of using foul language (for example, “bloody hell”).

Dysphemism – this is the substitution of an offensive or disparaging term of an inoffensive one. Most deliberately abusive swearing involves the use of dysphemisms (for example, using “ass” rather than “fanny”).

Euphemistic swearing – this involves the substitution of an inoffensive term, or one that is seen as acceptable (Goodness gracious) for one that is considered indelicate or taboo-breaking (Good God Almighty!).

Expletive – this is the exclamatory swear word or phrase in emotional circumstances; it betrays a letting of pent-up steam. Literal surface-level is secondary (Great balls of fire! ;Mother of God!; Fucking hell!). what is being signaled is the release of emotion.

Insult – loosely speaking, in an abusive context, when you swear at someone, you intend to insult them. In more precise terms, insult is reserved for an abusive term that is meant literally, rather than in the metaphoric sense.

Invective – this is a refined version of the insult used in formal contexts, a notable example being the Australian Parliament, where it might be considered a minor art form. It can vary in its degree of subtlety, involving any or all of biting irony, wit, puns, and wordplay. It often allows the user to insult his or her victim without using taboo words or breaching social protocol.

Oath – the word has two meanings that parallels the two broad contexts of use of “swear”. One is formal promise you make when you swear by the Bible. The second meaning is rather like the loose metaphoric curse, for example “He muttered an oath when the hammer hit his finger”.

Obscenity – swearing through the explicit use of indecent or taboo words to refer to intimate parts of the body and the body’s functions and products (shit, fuck).

Taboo words – these are words that have been prescribed by a particular culture as being off-limits. They may be words that disrespect religion, or that make public reference to intimate acts. They may also include stigmatize topics such as mental illness, birth defects, or person detention in prison. Topics such as death, income, or a person religious affiliation also carry taboos. A whole vocabulary of euphemisms now exists (for example passing away; remuneration; faith) to allow people to discuss these topics in public.

Vulgarity – a form of swearing that makes use of foul language by breaking taboos related to intimate language. It is broader than obscenity but is loosely used interchangeably.

Scatology – the study of excrement; interest in or the treatment of obscene matters.

Slang – very informal and sometimes offensive words that is used by a sub-groups of people, such as young people, drug dealers, baseball players, etc.

IV.2 Defying Euphemisms

Euphemism is clearly the closest semantic relation, since all the classic formulations of political correctness show avoidance of direct reference to some embarrassing topic or condition. These go far beyond the traditional topics and modes of euphemism, including, for example, disadvantaged, substance abuse, demographics, differently abled, and vertically challenged. Euphemism and other forms of verbal sanitization have a long history and typically take two semantic forms: the metaphorical use of root terms (pass water instead of piss), or the substitution of so-called Anglo-Saxon words by polysyllabic abstract formulations using classical vocabulary, well described by Edward Gibbon as “the decent obscurity of a learned language”. Examples range from terminal pregnancy instead of abortion, erectile dysfunction for impotence, or terminate with extreme prejudice instead of kill. While the first examples are natural and have a long history in the speech community, the latter are more institutional, recent, unfamiliar.

Significantly, Michel Breal, the founding figure of semantics, noted in his seminal work over a century ago that words often “come to possess a disagreeable sense as a result of euphemism”. This is, of course, an ironic outcome, since the intention of euphemism is precisely to avoid “the disagreeable sense”. The point is that euphemisms seldom remain euphemisms over time, but become tainted by association with what they seek to disguise.

Breal also perceived the results of “false delicacy” in sensitive areas. This perception was taken further by the semanticist Stephen Ullmann, who argued that “notorious deterioration which has effected various words for girl or woman…was no doubt due to genuine or pseudo-euphemism”. Ullmann’s valuable term pseudo-euphemism is a more technical version of Breal’s “false delicacy”. Indeed, both “false delicacy” and “pseudo-euphemism” are very apt descriptions of much of the terminology of political correctness.

Euphemism is a genuine collective attempt to avoid an embarrassing topic that often becomes undetermined by association, whereas pseudo-euphemism typically betrays certain elements of humorous connivance and irony. Thus to say “snooks is two cards slow on the uptake” is a euphemism, whereas to say “Snooks is two cards short of a full house” is a pseudo-euphemism. Pseudo-euphemism draws attention to itself by being maliciously clever: thus “slow on the uptake” is an established phrase, a variation of “slow witted”, whereas “two cards short of a full house” is a creative variation of a fertile new idiom.

Both modes are well established. Thus the ironic phrase “lick of the tar brush” is included by Francis Gore in his inimitable slang dictionary, “A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue” (1785), explaining another euphemism, “blue skin”: “A person begotten on a black woman by a white man”. However, all euphemism, precisely because they are not literal, are code terms or phrase depending on tacit or mutual understandings.

The focus of euphemisms has, of course, changed from universal such as death, disease, sex, bodily functions, madness, the names of God and Devil, to being crippled, being poor, being fired, being fat.

Euphemisms are the result, not of changes in the real world, but of changes in the conscience of a society in areas where it feels guilt or is afraid to talk about a taboo subject. These areas have traditionally been the human body, death, sex, violence and money. But other fields are also involved – for example prisons, which have become correctional centres or rehabilitative correctional facilities, or menial jobs, so that servants can be referred to as domestic engineers, and refuse/garbage collectors as disposal operatives (BrE) or sanitation engineers (AmE). These euphemisms soon lose their force and new ones have to be created that are (as yet) free of the guilty or embarrassing association, and in this way euphemisms increase the word stock of English. Not only are euphemisms the cause of increased lexical turnover, but they can also cause the loss of a lexical unit. A recent case is that of gay, both noun and adjective, which is currently used almost exclusively in the sense of 'homosexual' and has almost completely lost its older sense of happy.

IV.3 Uses of Euphemisms

There is much less systematic research available on euphemism, although it is widely referred to in anthropological literature and in popular linguistics. First, euphemism is frequently correlated either with anthropological notion of taboo or the psychoanalytic notion of repression. And there are three commonly occurring taboo repressed topics: death (and killing), sex (and birth), the sacred and the evil).

Fussell (1975) has amply shown the role of euphemism on times of war, and in the realm of linguistics. Jespersen too has noted the accumulation of World War I euphemisms for death; in the nuclear age euphemisms for death and killing also abound (collateral damage is perhaps the most famous). Tyler (1978) points out that sacred names are taboo and get replaced by definite descriptions that focus on particular attributes. Deities are referred to as :lawgiver”, “punisher of evil doers” and the like :the name “Peacekeeper” seems somewhat analogue.

Discourse producers concentrate linguistic effects at CDMs (critical discourse moments). The aim is to “mobilize meaning” by:

Legitimizing

Reifying

Dissimulating

Many linguistic devices may be deployed. Metaphors and Euphemism are twin poles of ideological discourse.

METAPHOR: trigger frames, map frames onto other frames; variable interpretation. Function: legitimize (also reify, dissimulate); Linguistic resources: lexical and grammatical metaphor (pronouns, modal ambiguity, nominalizations)

EUPHEMISM: shallow sentence processing; mental model of object or event not formed. Function: mainly to dissimulate. Euphemisms are sometimes metaphors (and vice versa). Linguistic resources: lexical (e. g pass away, neutralize, take out). Grammatical euphemism: nominalization (nuclear release); presuppositions, hints (e. g “why NATO need nuclear weapons” – presupposes NATO needs nuclear weapons).

Meaning in this section will be understood in the wider sense of the usage conditions of lexemes, which include not only semantic shifts, but also grammatical and pragmatic shifts. A shift is called pragmatic for instance when a word is 'upgraded' from slang to colloquial to neutral, as has happened to mob, a shortened form ( < Latin mobile vulgus = excitable crowd) which, although condemned by Swift in the eighteenth century, has established itself by now as a part of stylistically neutral English. The opposite has happened to governor, which developed a colloquial sense in the nineteenth century ('the person in authority, one's employer'), often spelled or shortened to, especially as a form of address. Beside shifts in the level of formality there are those of acceptability, e.g. the use of hopefully, like as conjunction, or flammable (= easily set on fire) instead of historically correct inflammable. Next come changes in the geographical status of items, the most important type of which are nowadays AmE items that are accepted in ever increasing numbers into other national varieties, while there are many fewer British English items such as fridge (= shortened form of refrigerator) that have made it into AmE.

Semantic changes Most semantic changes take place in small steps that can often be traced. Meanings are usually related by way of association, either because of their similarity or their nearness (contiguity). These associations can involve either the form of lexemes or their meaning; consequently, there are four different processes of meaning change:

Folk etymology Folk etymology relates to the substitution of forms that speakers cannot (or can no longer) analyse by ones that are morphologically transparent. bridegome (bride = 'bride'; gome = 'man'), where the second element ceased to be understood and was altered to groom. A more complex example is the verb depart ('separate'), which was used in the wedding ceremony till death us depart. This meaning of depart became obsolete and the verb was re-analysed as do and part, and later the word order was regularized (… till death do us part). Though of considerable historical interest, folk etymology has never been a productive process.

Beside the four associative processes just discussed there are four types of meaning change which describe the semantic results: specialization (or narrowing, restriction), generalization (or widening, extension), deterioration (or pejoration, catachresis) and amelioration (a change for the better). Specialization and generalization are changes in the denotative meaning of words, while deterioration and amelioration concern their affective meaning. Cannon has found that generalizations are more numerous than specializations, and ameliorations outnumber pejorations. Also, most changes in his corpus are from concrete to abstract meanings. In this process nouns (mostly composite forms) provide almost two thirds of the new meanings; the remainder are accounted for chiefly by verbs and adjectives.

Amelioration and pejoration The phrase the state of the art was originally a typical (sub-) title of a report on what had been achieved in a particular field. The adjective state-of-the-art has ameliorated from being neutral and merely descriptive to denote the latest, and therefore the best of its kind (state-of-the-art technology). Exposure (= revelation of an embarrassing truth) is no longer always something to be feared, e.g. he had, in a few short days of intense exposure, become a folk hero. Cowboy, on the other hand, has come via pejoration to refer to an unscrupulous businessman with little qualification. Mental has developed the additional meaning of insane (he's gone completely mental).

Meaning and society Changes in the affective meaning of words often reflect changes in the evaluation that societies, or certain powerful groups in society, put on them. It has been pointed out that some words referring to low social status have come to express low moral evaluation, as in churl, knave, villain. High status terms, conversely, now express moral approval, e.g. free, gentle, noble (see Hughes 1988 for more examples). To get publicity in the media nowadays, even if unfavourable, is regarded by some people as desirable, which could explain the revaluation of exposure. English is in fact rich in examples of lexemes referring to members of minorities or powerless groups that have undergone pejoration (e.g. Blacks, homosexuals, women). Homosexuals have more or less successfully fought this by consciously using gay, and Blacks have mounted a campaign with the slogan Black is beautiful. The attempt to reverse the semantic status imposed by the power elite can also be seen in the recent meanings of bad (= good, e.g. He's a bad man on drums, and the fans love him), tough (= excellent) and mean (= skilful, formidable; she plays a mean game of chess), which seem to have originated in the Black community in the US.

Meaning and the language system It must be stressed that semantic change does not occur in isolation. Rather, semantic changes are conditioned by changes in society. However, certain causes also lie in the language system itself, which may at least set the scene for some meaning changes. When semantic fields adopt new members, or when established members develop new meanings, this often has consequences for other members of the field. It has been shown how the OE and early ME term for animal, deer, changed to its present meaning of 'ruminant animal, hooved, antlered, and with spotted young' under the pressure of the loans beast, creature and animal. On the other hand, when one lexeme develops a meaning that makes it a member of a new field, then other members of the original field can develop similar meanings. Mad and crazy mean not only 'insane' but also 'wildly excited', which is now one of the meanings of both daft and mental (as in she is mental about punk rock) in BrE. Some cookery verbs when accompanied by human beings as objects have developed meanings in the field of inflicting pain, discomfort or punishment: grill can mean “interrogate”, fry “electrocute” and roast “ridicule or criticize severely or mercilessly”.

In 1972, the National Council of Teachers established the Committee on Public Doublespeak for the purpose of drawing attention to public language that is “grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-contradictory” and to language that is “used to lie or mislead while pretending to tell the truth”.

Next, there are a few examples of doublespeak and euphemisms from the categories of government, military, politically, following a substantial number of examples from educational circles.

PC language While euphemisms are universal, politically correct (PC ) language (especially non-sexist; ) is employed to different degrees in English speaking countries. It was first developed, and is most regularly and frequently used, in the United States, particularly in official documents while Britain and other nations are less keen to right past wrongs in the language they use. A well known case is the terminology for people 'of African heritage' in the US. Some prefer to be called African-American, a word which has (partially) replaced Afro-American, which (partially) replaced the term Black, which (partially) replaced Negros, which in turn largely replaced Coloured, which replaced earlier Black. For people with disabilities, new phrasal adjectives like hearing-impaired, mentally/physically challenged and visually impaired/challenged have been coined, which are, however, also used to make fun of PC language, e.g. residentially challenged (= homeless), vertically challenged (= short) or financially challenged (= poor).

Government

Table 1 provides some examples of governmental terms that have changed during the past few years. Of special note is the “cow, pig and sheep” designation that the United States Department of Agriculture changed to “grain-consuming animal units”.

Table 1

Military

Although military is a government entity, it deserves to be placed in a special category because its creative use of doublespeak.

Table 2 lists some of the term changes used by military spokespersons – spin doctors, you can say – either to deceive the public to ameliorate perceptions of the ravages of war. Perhaps the most deluding of the examples are “friendly fire” (shooting our own troops) and “collateral damage” (killing civilians).

Table 2

Politically Correct

We’re all familiar with the numerous “ politically correct” terms that are popular today. Probably more euphemistic that doublespeak in nature , such terms as African-American, Asian –American , Mexican-American, and physically challenged are “ kinder and gender” descriptions that some words previously used .

Table 4 contains of glossary of politically correct terms

Source : Unnamed underground newspaper. 1993 ( Spring) Austin, Texas, Reported to author by LeaVonne Pulley.

Special education

It should be noted that table 5 is titled “ Special Education Euphemisms” . The new terms cannot be classified as doublespeak because they are not intentionally deceptive or evasive, in fact, they are less offensive and in better taste . For the most part, name changes in the special education field are a vast improvement over previously used expressions.

Educational euphemisms

Slang expression usually start out as crude pr grotesque figures of speech. Often they are refreshing when they first appear; before we have had time to perceive how much they distort reality, we enjoy their gross exaggeration and crude imagery as we enjoy the same qualities in a newspaper cartoon. But if they happen to “catch on” – and it is naturally the crudest or most “sensational” which do so – then they are wearisomely repeated day and day out until their effect is the extreme opposite of what it was in the beginning. Whereas what we may call “legitimate” language has striven steadily, through the ages, for finer precision of utterance, the characteristic quality of slang or jargon is looseness. Since a slang expression means nothing exactly, it can seem to fit one idea about as well as another. So the lazy-minded person is easily enslave to it, and lets down ever more limply from any effort at discrimination in his speech.

A conspicuous example of current jargon is the expression “set-up”. It is remarkable how this primitively coined word has “caught on” within recent years. Many of the metaphors of slang are, in their somewhat violent way, rather illuminating, but this one clarifies nothing. Yet in the speech of ever so many people it establishes itself as a convenient substitute for a host of terms representing widely-varying ideas: plan, system, program, organization, administration, and so on. The word is certainly not especially pleasing in its sound and its immoderate repetition hardly makes it more attractive.

In all such locutions as this one and those showed above, the phenomenon seems to be mainly a matter of accepting uncritically whatever ready-made concept happens to be in circulation at the moment. Somewhat different is the conscious effort to put a better face upon something by giving it a more “fancy” or supposedly more dignified name. in the long run, such an attempt is very likely to fail. The would-be euphemism gradually takes on the color of its new application. For extreme examples one might consider “insane” (literally unwell or unsound), “disease” (lack of ease), or “privy”, the once very high tone of which is implied in the British Privy Council or Privy Seal.

I extracted below some words that are used in other forms, but expressing the same meaning. All this to evict the taboo it contains.

Abuse: the use of a person or object for a taboo or illegal purpose Literally, any kind of maltreatment or misuse. Descriptive as both noun and verb of sexual activity, especially by adults with children

Adventuress: a promiscuous female.

Afterlife: death Used especially by Quakers, spiritualists, and others who have confidence that death is not the end.

Affirmative action: preferential treatment for particular classes of people when making appointments Originally, in America, denoting attempts to promote black people. Now used of similar preference given to those who are not dominant white, fit, heterosexual males

Ageful: American old or geriatric Coined by the POLITICALLY CORRECT, among whom any mention that people grow old, and therefore often infirm, is taboo. In British legal jargon, to be of full age is to be eighteen years or older.

Anything taboo beginning with the letter B Specifically for bloody as in the expression Bfool; for bugger in the expression B off; for bitch in the insulting silly B, of a woman; for benzedrine in the expression B-pill; etc.

Backdoor 1: the anus Mainly homosexual use. However, a back-door man was also a married woman's extramarital sexual partner. If he did the back-door trot, it was not because the husband had come home unexpectedly, but to the lavatory with diarrhea.

Back-door 2: to pass information improperly Open communications are supposedly made through the front door

Bananas: mentally disturbed Probably because the fruit is favoured by monkeys. The phrase is often used to refer to mild hysteria

Anything taboo beginning with the letter C It is used for cancer, which is also referred to as the BIG c, or for cocaine or CRACK 3. US army laxatives in the Second World War were called CC pills, the equivalent of the British NUMBER NINE.

Call of nature: the need to urinate or defecate.

Call girl a prostitute Originally operating from a CALL HOUSE, but the name became more applicable to those summoned by telephone.

Career change: dismissal from employment.

Carry a torch for: to desire sexually The imagery is from a religious processional light. Usually of unrequited love.

Cold deck a pack of cards which has been arranged for use by a cheat Literally, one which has not been played with.

Anything taboo beginning with the letter D Usually damn, damned, damnable, and the like which used to be less socially acceptable in polite speech than they are today.

Dead meat: a human corpse Criminal jargon beloved of writers of detective stories. To make dead meat of is to kill a human being.

Décolletage the breasts of an adult female. Literally in French, the cutting out of the neckline of a dress whence, in English, what may be revealed by excessive cutting out.

Facile: sexually compliant Used only of women and in one of its senses a synonym of easy, as in EASY WOMA

Fairy: a homosexual Usually denoting a male taking the female role, but also used collectively.

Fair: poor A classification denoting scholastic performance or the quality of goods and services which is just above the lowest rating or outright rejection. It should mean favourable, or at least halfway between good and bad.

Faithful: not having a sexual relationship with anyone other than your regular sexual partner Literally, true to your word or belief, but in this sense limited to one of the marriage vows.

Garden: British to sow mines in water from the air Second World War usage which, by describing the operation horticulturally, avoided explicit lethal terms and adverted to the comparative safety of the operation

Gas: deliberately to kill or injure by poison gas A usage about soldiers in the First World War; the chronically unfit, the gypsies, and the Jews in Nazi Germany; civilians in modern Iraq; and convicted murderers in some American states, where they may also get the gas pipe

Education

The first item in table 3 was my introduction to a form a doublespeak in the education arena.

In the recent years, I have observed the English habit for using multiple terms for a single referent .

Table 6 is a compilation of some examples of that jargon.

It may be argued that some of the concepts referred to by the two terms are, in fact , dissimilar . That may be true in a few instance , but for the most part it is questionable whether the referent is deserving of a different term.

At this point I’m talking the liberty of presenting Two Doublespeak in Education Awards. Second place goes to those who “ crafted “ the Nation Risk report . As you will recall , the report declared that English educational system was complete disaster – so such so that the nation was a risk . After pointing out the problems in educational land , the reports listed several recommendations for resolving the numerous deficiencies . These included using more technology, a longer school day, a longer school year, and higher salaries for teachers. But who would pay for these increased expenditures ?

A parent wrote the principal:

I have a college degree , speak two foreign languages and four Indian dialects, have been to a number of country fairs and three goat ropings , but I haven’t the faintest idea as to what the hell you are talking about . Do you?( Wiles and Bondi 1984).

"During a dinner party in Virginia before World War II, Winston Churchill asked the butler for some breast of chicken. According to Churchill family lore, a woman sitting next to him reprimanded the British guest for using this vulgar term. And what should he have asked for? "White meat,' Churchill was told. The next day Churchill sent the woman a corsage with the message, "Put this on your white meat.'"

That juicy anecdote appears in the first chapter of Ralph Keyes' fascinating book Euphemania. Euphemisms, Keyes tells us, have been around as long as language. The word comes from a figure in Greek mythology, Eupheme, who was nurse to the muses. It translates to "good speaking." From good speaking, then, we come to the euphemism, which Keyes defines broadly as a word or phrase substituted for one that makes us uneasy. As the sources of our uneasiness change, so do our euphemisms, but it all began with fear. The earliest known euphemism, perhaps 1,000 years old, is thought to be the word bear, which originally meant the "brown one" and was substituted for another word, now lost to history, that was, apparently, very scary. The idea, of course, was that you shouldn't utter the names of scary stuff, especially animals or anything in the monster family, lest they hear you and decide to pay a visit. Hence, lions became "lords of the underworld" and tigers were "the striped ones." This phenomenon is at work today, at least in the wizarding world of Harry Porter, where the evil Lord Voldemort is referred to as He Who Must Not Be Named, or, more colloquially, You Know Who.

Gradually, of course, we found ways to avoid lions, tigers, and bears, so the need to euphemize their names lessened. Ah, but there's always something else on the horizon to make us uneasy. Take God. Keyes cites fear of blasphemy as the next great source of euphemism in human history. Unlike the Christian God, who many consider benevolent, Greek gods were known for their cantankerousness, which may have prompted the Greeks to refer to them, hopefully, as "the kindly ones" or "the gracious ones." Anything to prevent a grumpy Zeus from firing off a fire bolt. Not that fear of godly reprisals disappeared with the Greeks. Medieval Englishmen, Keyes records, favored "by Jove" as a substitute for "by God," and antebellum Americans opted for the more down-home "by Gum." Americans turned out to be remarkably creative in their attempts to avoid taking the Lord's name in vain. "Jesus Christ" somehow became "jeans rice," and, even more oddly, a whole strain of dairy-based euphemisms took hold, if briefly: "holy swiss cheese," "sweet cheesecake," and "cheese and rice" being only a few of the phrases in the arsenal of early Americans who felt that milk products would be just the ticket to keep the Almighty's anger at bay (yet another use of comfort food).

It doesn't stop with religion. Keyes is at his best when explaining how the growth of the middle class unleashed perhaps the golden age of euphemism. For anyone who has successfully clawed his way to a higher social station, the greatest fear, naturally, is slipping backward or, nearly as bad, not having your social status recognized by others. The Victorians could rely on their accents to make class distinctions, but coarse language was a problem even when pronounced correctly. Suddenly impropriety had surpassed blasphemy as the great engenderer of euphemism. In Jane Austen's world, "mastery of euphemism became no less a part of womanly arts than the ability to gracefully pour tea." In America, it may even have been worse. Thank democracy for that. When the built-in barriers permitting movement from one class to another disappear, verbal insecurity runs rampant. Even the British were in awe at the American mastery of euphemism. Keyes remarks that, after visiting America, Frances Trollope, mother of novelist Anthony, found that "many words to which I had never heard an objectionable meaning attached were totally interdicted, and the strangest paraphrastic sentences substituted." Well, that's pretty fancy talk, Frances, but we get the point: when it comes to verbal evasion, we Yanks gave you Brits a real lickin'.

It's easy to laugh at the euphemisms of yesteryear, but it might be wise to stifle that guffaw. We're hardly plain speakers ourselves. Throughout the long history of word substitution, the motive, as we've seen, has usually been fear. Some of those fears (getting eaten by bears, for example) seem more legitimate than others (being thrown out of the Rotary for saying sweet Jesus instead of sweet cheesecake), but all in all, everyone understands fear, even fear of silly things. In the last couple of decades, though, euphemism has become more about obfuscation and less about fear. Why obfuscate? Either to con the unknowing (think subprime mortgages), or to seem superior by virtue of creating your own language, or to mask what you're really doing. The language of modern finance is the greatest culprit (market crashes, once "panics," are now "downturns"), but every bureaucracy is culpable.

CONCLUSION

As intellectuals , we are not immune to the use of deceptive or evasive language. Sadly , however, when we engage in such practice, we violate at least two qualities that should serve as foundations for our profession-integrity and the ability to communicate accurately. Although euphemisms are often less offensive and distasteful that some more commonly used terms , sometimes they become evasive . Doublespeak , on the other hand, contains elements of deceit and, therefore , should have no place in the communication of educators.

Although language necessarily changes and evolves with the passing of time, perhaps we should attempt to slow down that process by being more selective accurate in our choice of words , and refrain from speaking with forked tongue.

The oldest and most important taboo prohibitions are the two basic laws of toteism: namely not to kill the totem animal and to avoid sexual intercourse with totem companions of the other sex.

It would therefore seem that these must have been the oldest and strongest desires of mankind. We cannot understand this and therefore we cannot use these examples to test our assumptions as long as the meaning and the origin of the totemic system is so wholly unknown to us. But the very wording of these taboos and the fact that they occur together will remind anyone who knows the results of the psychoanalytic investigation of individuals, of something quite definite which psychoanalysts call the central point of the infantile wish life and the nucleus of the later neurosis.

All other varieties of taboo phenomena which have led to the attempted classifications noted above become unified if we sum them up in the following sentence: The basis of taboo is a forbidden action for which there exists a strong inclination in the unconscious. We know, without understanding it, that whoever does what is prohibited and violates the taboo, becomes himself taboo.

An individual who has violated a taboo becomes himself taboo because he has the dangerous property of tempting others to follow his example. He arouses envy; why should he be allowed to do what is prohibited to others? He is therefore really contagious, in so far as every example in- cites to imitation, and therefore he himself must be avoided.

But a person may become permanently or temporarily taboo without having violated any taboos, for the simple reason that he is in a condition which has the property of inciting the forbidden desires of others and of awakening the ambivalent conflict in them. Most of the exceptional positions and conditions have this character and possess this dangerous power.

Now, too, we understand why the forces inherent in the "mana" of various persons can neutralize one another so that the mana of one individual can partly cancel that of the other. The taboo of a king is too strong for his subject because the social difference between them is too great. But a minister, for example, can become the harmless mediator between them. Translated from the language of taboo into the language of normal psychology this means: the subject who shrinks from the tremendous temptation which contact with the king creates for him can brook the intercourse of an official, whom he does not have to envy so much and whose position perhaps seems attainable to him. The minister, on his part, can moderate his envy of the king by taking into consideration the power that has been granted to him. Thus smaller differences in the magic power that lead to temptation are less to be feared than exceptionally big differences.

It is equally clear how the violation of certain taboo prohibitions becomes a social danger which must be punished or expiated by all the members of society lest it harm them all. This danger really exists if we substitute the known impulses for the unconscious desires. It consists in the possibility of imitation, as a result of which society would soon be dissolved. If the others did not punish the violation they would perforce become aware that they want to imitate the evil doer.

Taboo differs from other early institutions of society in that it relates largely to everyday conduct. It is obvious that a universally accepted system of prohibition in a community must have some effect on men’s idea of that constitutes right and wrong, and that a whispered institution must be intimately connected with the history of civilization.

It may be assumed that the sentiment of obligation preceded the institution of taboo. In our own life we know of nothing except social intercourse that directly affects either the moral sentiment or the moral code. This intercourse may be with men or with gods. This latter side has become in modern times simply an aspiration; in the earliest human stage with which we are acquainted it is an objective fact – the powerful god and the powerful man are feared. Taboo deals with the first class of duties, ordinary morality.

The question of the universality of taboo need not detain us. In the nature of the case its universality cannot be absolutely proved; but it is now found among civilized peoples in all the great divisions of the world, traces of it are discoverable in the great ancient religions and in the modern civilized communities, and for our purposes it may be assumed to have belonged to all early stages of social organization. Nor is its transmissibility a point of view for an inquiry into its moral influence.

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