The Torch Magazine

Forbidden Words

2016 Paxton Award Winner

by

John P. Lewis

    Shakespeare wrote, "'Tis needful that the most immodest word / Be look'd upon and learn'd […] (2 Henry IV 4.4). Shakespeare met the demand for bawdy humor by obliquely referring to taboo words. Though he never used the f-word explicitly, his plays contain examples of puns and references to it (Sheidlower xiii).

    This paper makes three points about these immodest words.

   First, words are powerful. The old expression "Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me" simply is not true.

Second, words and their meanings continually change. English is a living language.

   Third, taboo language can do many different things. Cursing can be offensive or it can be funny. It can incite animosity or it can cement friendships. It all depends on context.

* * *

   Taboo words are as ubiquitous today as they were in Shakespeare's time. Last year The New York Times asked its subscribers, "How often, if at all, do you swear or curse in conversation?" Only 11% said they never did, while 61% said "occasionally," and 26% said "frequently." Two percent said "always" ("Dear Reader").

    Summarizing studies about the frequency of taboo words, Timothy Jay, a professor at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, found that swear words are .3 to .5% of the speech people use every day—one in every 200 to 300 words. His list of swear words included the phrase "Oh my God," abbreviated as "OMG" and ubiquitous in social media (Jay 153).

   Jay contends that two-thirds of swearing is to express anger or frustration. Why do we swear when we're angry? Obscenities and vulgarities seem to perform a psychological function. A study from Keele University in the U.K. demonstrated that swearing may not just express pain, but actually help relieve pain. In the study, students had to hold a hand in the bucket of ice water as long as they could. The students who could swear reported less pain and could keep their hand in the water on average forty seconds longer than the students who weren't allowed to swear (Stephens).

Why is this? Part of the reason may be that expletives are stored in a different part of the brain than the rest of language. Expletives appear to be stored in the right hemisphere, while the rest of language is stored in the left hemisphere. This location suggests that profanity activates the amygdala, and the amygdala triggers the fight or flight response, which dulls pain (Pinker).

    Vulgar language can bestow a kind of prestige on otherwise conventional speakers. According to the authors of Four Letter Word Games: the Psychology of Obscenity, "the quasi-decorous use of profanity in a fashionable context becomes a handy instrument for having one's world both ways. With a judiciously dropped four-letter bon mot we can, in sophisticated circles, be at the same time rebellious and respectable, prim and prurient" (Hartogs and Fantel 15).

    For example, during the 2004 election campaign both candidates John Kerry and Dick Cheney used forms of the f-word. While they received mild criticism for their language, each man positioned himself as a speaker who puts directness over convention (Battistella 77).

    Presidential candidate Donald Trump has drawn on vulgarity in his rhetorical strategy. In addition to telling people to "f***" themselves, he said he would "beat the s***" out of anyone attacking his supporters. Columnist Michael Gerson contends that "Trump identifies crudity with populism, as if using words of four letters were a protest against prim elites. Rough language is intended to convey strength and authenticity."

* * *

Clearly, we resort to profanity because a sort of power attaches to it. The power of a particular word, however, waxes and wanes as a language evolves. Linguistic change makes it difficult even to define precisely what profanity is. Some bad words are identical to perfectly fine words or can carry both taboo and non-taboo meanings, and the taboo meaning can in the long run drive out the non-taboo meaning (Curzan). An example of this is the word "cock," a perfectly acceptable term for a rooster when our society was more agrarian.

    As a radio broadcaster, I followed the Federal Communication Commission's (FCC) regulations concerning obscene and indecent speech. All broadcasters know about George Carlin's 1972 monologue "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." (If you want to know these words, a quick Internet search will satisfy your curiosity.) The FCC reprimanded Pacifica Foundation after its New York City FM station broadcast the monologue. The Supreme Court upheld the ruling. Some of the seven words are slightly less offensive today, and one of the seven has been commonplace for decades, usually in the phrase "pissed off."

    The line between the permissible and the impermissible is always moving. Court battles over profanity on radio and television are fascinating, especially when the court tries to distinguish between what is indecent and what is art. It seems capricious if expletives in Saving Private Ryan and nudity in Schindler's List are okay, but neither is acceptable on television's NYPD Blue. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg opined, "One cannot tell what's indecent and what isn't" (quoted by Curzan).

    Responding to shifts in cultural norms, today's television dramas are more linguistically frank. Because cable television is exempt from the FCC's obscenity rules, the language in its programming is more explicit than that in over-the-air broadcasting. "Broadcast television is under siege by smaller cable competitors that are winning audiences while pushing adult content," the New York Times reported in 2001, and the networks have in response become less strict themselves (Rutenberg).

Past uproars over taboo language in popular entertainment indicate how the landscape of the acceptable changes. George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion sparked controversy in 1914 when the actress playing Eliza Doolittle used the phrase "Not bloody likely!" Years later in 1962 the language in the play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was so disturbing that the trustees of Columbia University rejected the vote of its Pulitzer Prize committee. In 1994 some critics objected to giving the Man Booker Prize to James Kelman's novel How Late It Was, How Late because it used the f-word over 4,000 times (Battistella 68).

   In the 1939 film Gone with the Wind, Clark Gable as Rhett Butler memorably bids farewell to his wife, the former Scarlett O'Hara, with "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." It is hard to imagine him saying anything else, but "damn" had been prohibited by the 1930 Motion Picture Association's Production Code up until a month before the film's release, when the code was amended to allow using the word "damn" if it was in a quotation from a literary work (Lewis 305). In the 1942 musical 42nd Street, Ginger Rogers sings "He did right by little Nelly / with a shotgun at his bell..." and then substitutes "tummy" for "belly." "Belly" was considered rude while "tummy" was acceptable because of its association with children (McWhorter).

    Such caution may seem quaint now, given the linguistic latitude taken by hit cable television shows like The Sopranos and Girls. Many viewers consider the classic four-letter words as no longer truly profane. They qualify more as salty or "bad words" only to be avoided in work or school. A 20-something woman I know illustrated this idea when she told me that she did not consider the f-word or the s-word taboo. While she would not use these words around her elders, she is comfortable using them with her peers, calling them aural exclamation points.

    The concept of the taboo is not limited to spoken and written language. Within the deaf culture, there is a distinction between signs used to curse and signs used to designate objects and actions. For example, there are two signs for the s-word ("Profanity in American Sign Language.") Profanity also exists in emojis, the ideograms that originated in Japanese electronic messages and have now spread across the web. It is disquieting to visit the BuzzFeed web page entitled "21 Glorious Ways To Swear Using Emojis"; these childish-and-innocent looking cartoons can depict our worse vulgarities (Edds).

* * *

According to the OED, "taboo" is of Polynesian origin, meaning "set apart for or consecrated to a special purpose" or "restricted to use of a god, a king, a priest." Taboo words arise from taboo topics, ones connected not only to disgust, but also to anxiety and fear, even terror.    In medieval English when wars were fought over religious doctrine the chief category of profanity was swearing in the name of God. To swear to or by God was sinful: "And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him" (Leviticus 16:24).

    The need to avoid such transgressions produced various euphemisms, many of them still in use today, such as "by Jove," "by George," "gosh," and "golly." "Zounds!" was a twice shortening of "By His wounds," as in those of Jesus. In the 19th century, "darn" came into the language when people avoided saying "Eternal damnation!" by saying "Tarnation," which was recast as "darnation," from which we got "darn" (McWhorter).

    Such strategies for evading taboo language are a topic in themselves. Euphemisms—acceptable terms for inadmissible topics—are typically more colloquial and figurative than orthophemisms, or formal and precise terms, many of which date to the 1500s, when a fashion arose for using Latinate terms in place of native English ones for more private matters. To illustrate, for the dysphemism (or obscenity) of the s-word, "poo" is the euphemism, "feces" the orthophemism (Allan and Burridge 20-32).

    (So I ask: who ever stubbed his toe in the dark and cried out, "Oh, feces!"?)

    The taboo topic of death has generated a lot of euphemistic expressions, such as "pass away," "go to a better place," "meet our maker," "depart," and "no longer with us." And then there are a lot of irreverent ones like "push up the daises," "kick the bucket," "cash out," and "get a one-way ticket."

    By the late 18th century, sex, excretion, and the body parts associated with them transitioned from being merely bawdy to being as profane as religious swearing. Delicacy about body parts made some everyday words vulgar. For example, "leg" was seen as an impolite, if not bad, word and was replaced with "limb" in polite society. In talking about cooked chicken "white" and "dark" meat originated as terms to avoid mentioning breast and leg (McWhorter). The word "occupy" was taboo in the 17th and 18th centuries because it referred to having sexual relations (Curzan).

    Sexual obscenities have been taboo for a long time including, of course, the "f-word," which dates back to at least the 16th century(Curzan). Though the original edition of the gigantic Oxford English Dictionary published in 1884 did not include the f-word, all modern dictionaries, including the now on-line Oxford English Dictionary, define it. If you want to know more about the f-word, there are 270 pages about it in Jesse Sheidlower's book entitled The F Word. While the book includes many things you won't want to know, you will learn that some euphemisms for the word are "fricken," "freaking," and "friggin," as well as the social media exclamation, "WTF."

If you are fascinated by sex, enjoy insulting people, and dislike euphemisms, I suggest you obtain a little book called Depraved and Insulting English. In it Peter Novobatzky and Ammon Shea list alphabetically all of the depraved words—over a thousand—they could find in the English language.

* * *

The power of words and the power of historical change can both be seen in another realm of taboo language, the names given to or resisted by various communities. Many of our ancestors' forbidden words seem harmless today, but we have our own taboos: we regard as truly objectionable the slurs directed at groups that have historically suffered discrimination. Offensive words now are those deemed racist, sexist, and homophobic. Two other f-words, "faggot" and "fairy" are no longer appropriate.

Little People of America, an advocacy group for people 4 feet 10 inches tall and under, successfully petitioned the government to cease labeling small raisins as "midgets." The term "midget" is offensive to little people who view it as a slur. They call it "the M-word" (Kamen and Itkowitz).

    The little people's drive to banish their distasteful word is less controversial than Native American groups' attempt to force the Washington Redskins to drop the word "Redskins." While the U.S. Patent and Trademark office has won court approval of its decision that the team's name "may disparage" Native Americans, many of the team's fans disagree. "We have a new national passion for moral and historical hygiene, a determination to scrub away remembrance of unpleasant things […]" wrote one passionate fan, George Will.

    Today's most profane words include the c-word, which reduces women to a vulgar anatomical term, and, of course, the n-word.

Last summer, President Obama sat down with comedian Marc Maron for an hour-long podcast interview on diverse topics. In the 47th minute, when talking about race relations, Obama mentioned the n-word. CNN reported on the interview with the headline "Obama uses N-word." Obama sent "Fox and Friends" host Elizabeth Hasselbeck into a fit: "I think many people are wondering if it's only there that he would say it," she said (Eggert). Obama was not using the word as an expletive, we should recall, but in an academic semantic discussion. Nonetheless, the n-word is now more objectionable than the f-word. And more complicated.

In 2014 the National Football League instructed game officials to penalize players who use the n-word on the playing field. The NFL's "zero tolerance" gave officials the authority to issue a 15-yard penalty for the first offense and ejection from the game for a second. But this well-intentioned policy was widely criticized as being heavy-handed and out of touch. A Washington Post feature on the n-word said the NFL policy "is almost certainly doomed to fail; to be ignored at best—or mocked and flouted, at worst" (Sheinin and Thompson).

    Why does The Post think it is doomed to fail? For one thing, besides being sometimes humorous and sometimes offensive, profanity establish camaraderie and solidarity.   For decades there have actually been two n-words, one ending in an "a" and the other in "er." The "er" version is linked with hateful, racist origins. The one ending in "a" is said to be more about bonding when used among African Americans. There are those who argue, however, that these two versions are not so much distinct words as they are just different pronunciations of the same evil word. Semantic studies do show that what's taboo for one speaker or community might not be prohibited by another speaker or community.

    Law professor and author Paul Butler has said, "I'm African American, and I have a right to use that word in a way white people don't. I'm not talking about a legal right. I'm talking about a moral right. I don't think that's so hard to understand" (Sheinin and Thompson).

    Dineytra Lee, a hip-hop dancer, expressed still another viewpoint when she said, "[As] African Americans, we have kind of taken this word and flipped some vowels, and somehow it's okay. But then, it's not. This word has so much power. Everyone's just saying 'It's cool. It's just how I say my brother. It's just an expression.' But no, it's not" (Sheinin and Thompson).

    Will the n-word ever gain the respectability other former taboo words have gained? There are some indicators. In Atlanta, Christian rapper Sho Baraka reached the top of the U.S. gospel music charts with the album Talented 10th that makes brief use of the n-word—an inclusion that shook up the Christian pop music world. You can hear the n-word in the halls of most American high schools and not just spoken by African Americans. Hip-hop music is desensitizing our youth to the word.

    John McWhorter, a Columbia University linguistics professor, thinks the n-word will eventually become omnipresent. He said, "Frankly, we're just going to have to get used to it. It's a generational shift, and it's permanent" (Sheinin and Thompson). Others would disagree. Certainly while it may have made inroads in the youth culture, the n-world has not joined mainstream American culture.

    The introduction of taboo words into mainstream vocabulary might come in the future from services like Siri, the voice-activated assistant that debuted on the iPhone in 201l. Unbeknownst to Apple executives, their engineers programmed the phone with hidden risqué jokes. Red-faced executives removed them as they were discovered (Bilton). Perhaps future technology executives will want to stretch language boundaries in an attempt to make Siri and her cousins like Alexa seem more hip and even a little more human.

* * *

History has taught us that you cannot stamp out taboo words. The authors of Forbidden Words believe that "Bad language is not some nasty habit that we can be broken of like smoking in restaurants or nail biting. Forbidden words flourish all the more vigorously on a diet of individual censoring and public disapproval" (Allan and Burridge 252).

In this paper I make three observations: First, words are powerful; in fact they are so powerful we won't even say some of them. Second, words change all the time. The human mind is creative, and with that creativity we change the language. And third, what is taboo varies with context. Cursing can be offensive or it can be funny. It can incite animosity or it can cement friendships, and there can be a psychological benefit in using forbidden words. Taboo language does a lot of different social work.

There is an exuberance of expression that proliferates around the language taboo. The authors of Forbidden Words end their book with this about obscenities: "These expressions range from the exquisitely lyrical to the downright crass; yet many demonstrate an expressiveness and poetic ingenuity worthy of William Shakespeare" (Allan and Burridge 253).

Works Cited

Allan, Keith and Kate Burridge. Forbidden Words. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.

Battistella, Edwin L. Bad Language. New York: Oxford UP, 2005.

Bilton, Nick. "Siri, Tell Me a Joke. No, a Funny One." The New York Times. August 13, 2015.

Curzan, Ann. The Secret Life of Words: English Words and Their Origins. Lecture 13. Sound recording. The Great Courses, 2013.

"Dear Reader: Are You Prone to Profanity?" New York Times Magazine, 10 May 2015, 8.

Edds, Robin. "21 Glorious Ways to Swear Using Emojis". BuzzFeed.

Eggert, Randall. "How the n-word became the new f-word". The Washington Post. June 28, 2015.

Gerson, Michael. "Hiding behind profanity." The Washington Post. February 9, 2016.

Hartogs, Renatus and Hans Fantel. Four Letter Word Games: The Psychology of Obscenity. New York: Evans, 1967.

Jay, Timothy. "The Utility and Ubiquity of Taboo Words." Psychological Science 4:2 (2009), 153-61.

Kamen, Al and Colby Itkowitz. "In the Loop." The Washington Post. September 3, 2015.

Lewis, Jon. Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle Over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry. New York UP, 2000.

McWhorter, John H. "How Dare You Say That!" Wall Street Journal, July 18-19, 2015.

Novobatzky, Peter and Shea, Ammon. Depraved and Insulting English. New York: Harvest, 2002.

Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: Lippincott, 1994.

"Profanity in American Sign Language." Wikipedia.

Rutenberg, Jim. "Hurt by Cable, Networks Spout Expletives". New York Times. Sept. 2, 2001.

Sheinin, Dave and Krissah Thompson. "The N Word." The Washington Post. November 10, 2014.

Sheidlower, Jesse. The F-Word. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Stephens et al. "Swearing As a Response to Pain." NeuroReport 20:12 (2009), 1056-1060.

Will, George F. "A National Passion to Rename." The Washington Post. September 6, 2015.

John P. Lewis Biography

Lewis Photograph

    After graduating from Northwestern University with a degree in radio, TV and film, John Lewis joined his family radio business. The company initially operated radio stations in three states and then expanded into TV cable operations, constructing and operating systems in twelve Virginia municipalities.

    He was a founding member of the Virginia Cable Television Association, served as a director of the Association for 20 years, and was president for three terms.

Since retiring in 2008, he has continued an avid interest in photography, publishing two books of his images, and served on numerous community organization boards as a member or officer.

A charter member of the Winchester Torch Club, he has presented Torch papers on a variety of topics including extrasensory perception, the anthropic cosmological principle, year-round schooling, Mount Kilimanjaro, chaos theory, the definition of God and Richard Byrd's North Pole flight.

     He and his wife, Marjorie, have two children and three grandchildren.

The paper was first presented at the Winchester Club on November 4, 2015.