Word taboo

Profanity refers to language that is generally considered to be strongly impolite, rude, or offensive. Profanity may often serve an exclamation function, although typically it is used to insult another person. Thus, as a form of verbal violence, it is often considered taboo in polite company and subject to censoring (either by speakers themselves, or by some authority).[4]

While profane terms and insults tend to be derived from tabooed objects, such as bodily organs and excrement, not all references to tabooed objects are necessarily considered to be profanity. For example, in English, erudite terms for bodily functions do not tend to function well as insulting epithets, although this constraint may not apply to other categories of taboos, such as sexual practices. It has been suggested that whether a term can be considered an expletive may depend on whether it is intended to be applied figuratively or literally.[4]

In certain cultures, to say a tabooed name is akin to assaulting the owner of that name, and sanctions will be levied onto the offender. Punishments for violations of the taboo can be dealt in the form of payment of goods to an offended party, or appeasement of an offended spirit. In some cases, deliberate violations of naming taboo have led to death by murder or suicide due to shame.[4] In one example, a man from an Adzera-speaking village in Papua New Guinea had broken a very strong name taboo in front of his father-in-law. In shame, he fled into the mountains occupied by a rival tribe, deliberately allowing himself to be killed by the enemy.[5]

Euphemisms are typically used to avoid the explicit mention of forbidden subjects, as opposed to avoiding the use of forbidden elements of the language. In social interactions, euphemisms are used to avoid directly addressing subjects that might be deemed negative, embarrassing, or otherwise discomforting to the speaker or their listeners.

An example of a taboo topic among many cultures that is commonly avoided in language is disease. While many diseases have been studied and understood over decades, the taboo against diseases such as syphilis still runs deep. In modern times, doctors tend to continue avoiding the term syphilis with their patients, preferring to use alternative labels like treponemal disease, luetic disease (from Latin lues 'contagion, plague'), and so forth. In a similar vein, topics such as menstruation have also historically been considered taboo, thereby garnering euphemisms such as have an issue and flowers (Leviticus 15:1, 19–24[6]). In either case, both "afflictions" were taboo as they were considered dangerous; menstrual blood was thought to carry contagious diseases such as syphilis.[4]

Euphemisms can also used to downplay the gravity of large-scale injustices, war crimes, or other events that warrant a pattern of avoidance in official statements or documents. For instance, one reason for the comparative scarcity of written evidence documenting the exterminations at Auschwitz, relative to their sheer number, is "directives for the extermination process obscured in bureaucratic euphemisms".

Religion plays a significant role in the concept of taboo, as demonstrated by the etymology of the word taboo, which is borrowed from Tongan tapu (“prohibited, sacred”). The religious perspective tends to consider language as vested with supernatural powers. Consequently, religion tends to be a source of language taboo.

Across old, medieval and modern religious discourse, direct mention of the name of the "evil spirit" Satan reflects the taboo on the devil, born from out of the belief that doing so will incite misfortune on the speaker and interlocutor. Instead, this antagonist is euphemistically identified by the characteristic of being harmful or betraying towards the religion. This is seem from alternative labels such as feond (fiend) dating to Old English, enemī (enemy) dating to Middle English in 1382, and arch-traitor dating to Modern English in 1751, among countless others.[7]

Conversely, exalted beings in Christianity also hold different names. God, a supreme being known as the Father, the Almighty; Jesus as the Son of God, the Messiah; and the Virgin Mary as the Mother of God and the Holy Virgin. This time, the reason for euphemism stems from a sacred taboo aiming to preserve the sanctity of holy figures in the religion, separating the worldly human from divinity by avoiding the act of calling God's name "in vain".[4]

Taboo-motivated lexical replacement is a cross-linguistic phenomenon where the avoidance of taboos lexical items by speakers can motivate the creative use of language. The tabooed terms are eventually replaced, causing language change. This taboo-driven change can lead to the remodeling of language, or create semantic shift due to the use of figurative language in euphemisms. For example, the term stark naked derives from the expression start naked, dating back to Old English in the 13th century, where start originally was steort meaning ‘tail, rump’ in Old English.[8] The change in the final /t/ consonant to /k/ could be due to attempts to obfuscate the reference to the body part, or due to the influence of the phonetically similar term stark.[9]

The following languages exhibit examples of taboo-motivated lexical replacement:

• Coast Salish languages[10]
• Southern Bantu languages[11]
• Tiwi language[12]
• Haruai language[13]

Another example demonstrating how linguistic taboos can drive language change is the case of iSi-Hlonipha, which is the practice among Nguni-speaking communities where married women were forbidden from uttering sound sequences in their father-in-law's name. This fueled a need for replacement phonemes, which led to the import of phonemes from neighbouring languages. Thus, click consonants from imported from the nearby Zulu and Xhosa languages into Nguni, which did not originally feature clicks.[14]