No word can be completely forbidden. If no one is ever allowed to say a word under any
circumstances then children never hear it when they're growing up so they never learn
it and after a couple generations everyone who remembered it will have died and it won't
be a word in that language anymore. In fact, the more people know a word the stronger the
rule against it can be, because if everyone knows a word then when someone says it everyone
can immediately participate in punishing them. But for people to learn the word in the first
place there have to be some circumstances where it's permissible, or at least tolerated.
What all this means is that I'm probably not going to be telling you any words you
don't already know, at least in English, so if you came here for any huge surprises
on that front you might be disappointed. But I still think it's really interesting and
counterintuitive that there are so many words that we have in our language but that you're
not really supposed to use, and not only that but the presence of words like that seems
like it might be universal to all languages. There's a lot of ways of categorizing these
words but I think the most useful way to sort them is by why people think you shouldn't
say them in the first place, which gets you about three types of forbidden words.
Uh, before I go on, fair warning, I'm going to be saying, like, all of these words, or
at least all the ones in English. I won't be using them exactly, but I am going to be
saying them so that we all know what we're talking about. So uh, viewer discretion advised.
Alright, the first type of forbidden words are the ones for which it's probably the
easiest to understand why people would want to avoid them: blasphemous words. These are
usually names for some sort of supernatural entity, a god or spirit or angel or demon
or something like that. It's really common in cultures around the world for people to
think that saying the name of something like this will call its attention to you and, perhaps
depending on how respectfully you said it, possibly anger them. Therefor, if you want
them to like you, it's probably best not to call their attention to you frivolously,
and if you want them to ignore you it's probably best to just never say their name
at all. We don't really have words like this in English any more, but boy did we used
to. In the middle ages saying words like "God," "Jesus," "hell," or "Devil" was
taken very seriously by both the church and the state and was often illegal. But my favorite
example of this type of word is from Hebrew. Religious jews from ancient times and up to
today go way out of their way to never, ever say Yahweh, which is basically the most direct
possible name for God in Hebrew. They don't even write it unless they're making a copy
of the bible, which makes it probably the strictest prohibition on a word I'm going
to talk about in this video. I could give more examples but this category
is pretty self explanatory, so let's move on to the second type of forbidden word. This
one is easily the one that's most confusing for me. You see, in a lot of languages, maybe
even all of them, there are taboo words that refer to something having to do with either
sex or excrement, either referring to those things directly or referring to things that
the culture deems somehow related. Words like this in English include shit, piss, fuck,
cock and cunt, just to name a few of the worse ones. Oddly enough though these words are
rarely used in their literal sense. When someone says "fuck" or "fucking" they're
actually talking about sex maybe one time out of a hundred. The rest of the time they've
probably either stubbed their toe or they're losing at Mario Kart.
What interests me most about these words is that everyone agrees that they shouldn't
be said in certain circumstances but very few people have clear beliefs about why. It
seems kind of like wearing pants in public: everyone does it because everyone else does
it. Anybody can imagine a society where no one wears pants, and nothing necessarily seems
wrong with it, but nobody wants to be the first person to try it.
I'd really like to be able to tell you about the historical circumstances that lead to
words like this, but unfortunately there's not much much research into that area. A decent
amount has been written about the origin of these particular English words, but similar
words exist in loads of other languages and I honestly have no idea how much of what happened
in English is applicable to other languages. So, with that disclaimer, here's about what
happened in English. In the beginning (and by "beginning" I
mean about 1500) these words didn't have any stigma at all. They were direct but not
vulgar, kind of like today's words "penis" and "vagina," words which, by the way,
didn't exist at the time and were only borrowed form Latin in the 1600s.
So what changed between then and now? A lot, but three main things:
Firstly, there were a lot of people, especially around the protestant reformation, who thought
that naming things having to do with sex directly would inspire lust and, therefor sin, so they
did their best to talk about them in a super round-about way.
Somewhat after that but also kind of simultaneous with it people started avoiding talking about
sex and excrement all together. This was especially true in the victorian era, when even the word
"leg" was considered by some to be too sexually suggestive for public use.
Thirdly, some people saw it as class marker. The middle class in England at the time used
their avoidance of these words as a way to differentiate themselves from the lower classes
who they thought used them more freely. Squeamishness around sex and poop as well
as class divisions certainly aren't unique to the English speaking world, so I wouldn't
at all be surprised if these are where swear words come from in other languages as well,
but on the other hand it's a sample size of one so who knows.
Now we come to the last type of forbidden word, which unlike the other two I actually
fully endorse the prohibition against. These words are slurs: words that refer to some
category of people while also attaching a strong negative value judgement to those people.
The most common and widely studied of these words refer to ethnic and racial groups, so
I'm gonna focus mostly on them in this video, although similar words refer to sexual orientation,
gender, religion, disability and all kinds of stuff. Words like this in English include
chink, coon, spic, gook, paki, and of course "negro," variously pronounced "nigger"
or "niggah." Anyway, there's actually a few slightly
different theories as to what exactly makes these words so bad. Most of them revolve around
the idea that these words are somehow connected to both a group of people and a series of
negative stereotypes about that group of people. I think that's pretty clear from the fact
that some people use the N-word to refer to black people without any negative judgement
intended, while others use it to refer to people who fit properties traditionally associated
with black people regardless of that person's race. For some the word only means the category
of people and for others it only means the stereotypes, but for most people it's at
least connected to both. But how exactly it's connected to both is
a matter of debate. Some scholars have argued that the category of people and the negative
value judgement are all contained in a slur's literal meaning. It's kind of like how the
word penguin refers to flightless black and white animals with wings and beaks and flippers
that lay eggs and live in Antarctica. If you use the word penguin to refer to something
it suggests that you think that penguins are a thing, that these traits (which aren't
necessarily logically related) tend to cluster with each other in the real world, so something
with a few of them is probably a penguin and will therefor have the other qualities of
a penguin as well. In the same way, some people think that slurs refer to categories that
include both the ethnic group and the stereotypes about that ethic group, so that using the
slur suggests that these properties naturally belong together.
Not everyone agrees with this analysis though. Another theory is that slurs literally refer
only to the category of people but that they also carry some sort of evaluative connotation.
Kind of like how "exit the building promptly" and "get out now!" literally mean the
same thing but imply radically different emotions on the part of the speaker. In the same way,
this theory says that "there's a gay guy over there" and "there's a f***** over
there" literally mean the same thing but one implies that the speaker has negative
attitudes towards gay people and the other doesn't.
There's a lot of subtle variations on both of these theories, and they tend to struggle
with the fact that different people clearly use these words in different ways. For instance
the phenomenon of members of the targeted group using a slur as a mock insult amongst
themselves to acknowledge their shared community has been talked about at length by many people
much smarter than me. Different theories explain all this in slightly different ways, but one
thing that they all agree on is that most of the time the people who these words target
feel attacked when people not in that group direct it towards them, which makes sense
when you consider that a lot of people have used and continue to use these words for the
specific purpose of attacking them. I hope you don't need a rigorous linguistic analysis
to see the logic in that. That said, I hope the educational value of
this video outweighs any discomfort I might have caused by saying all these words, not
just the slurs but also the religious swears and profanity. I'm sorry if anything I said
in this video bothered you or offended you, and I promise my next video won't feature
such a touchy topic. See you then!
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