Language Log

Another year of taboo avoidance

It's been almost a year since I assembled an omnibus posting (10/9/06) on taboo avoidance, and the mail has been piling up alarmingly.  And now that I've posted briefly on taboo avoidance and plain speaking in the New York Times, it's time to look at the rest of the media, blogs, and the like. 

It's dangerous to try to discern general trends in these things, but my impression is that while we might be living in "the Golden Age of taboo avoidance" (as Ben Zimmer has put it to me), we're also seeing some publications guardedly moving towards somewhat greater openness.  The result is, of course, confusion and inconsistency.  And, in the case of automatic asterisking/bleeping programs, downright absurdity.

Here's a sampling of things that came to me over the past year that haven't been blogged on here.  It doesn't pretend to be a complete survey of taboo avoidance (or use) during the year; it merely illustrates a variety of approaches to the problem.  (The examples are grouped into rough categories for exposition; no serious analysis is intended by this categorization.)

At this point, after two years on the Taboo Desk at LLP, I would like to take a vacation from tracking taboo avoidance, so that I can attend to some other topics.


1.  Approaches to use/avoidance. 

Some publications generally go for avoidance.  Some, like the Guardian, the New Yorker, and the Economist are on record as using words like cunt and fuck where they are newsworthy (almost always in quotations).  So you get the Economist, back on 2.28/02, in reporting a minor transport-ministry scandal, publishing the revelatory quote:


Lane Greene, who relayed this to me on 7/4/06, noted that the Guardian used cunt considerably more often than one might have expected, sometimes in the writer's own voice, as in this column by Peter Tatchell:

Nevertheless, the impulse towards modesty, or presumed modesty, is strong these days.


2.  Circumlocution, paraphrase, and allusion.

The Wall Street Journal (like the New York Times) generally avoids asterisks and the like, in favor of work-arounds, sometimes elaborate and coy ones, as in this article (of 8/18/06) about the movie Snakes on a Plane:


(Thanks to Jake Seliger.  More Snakes on a Plane material from Ben Zimmer here.)

Even more tortured is Leah Garchik's


from her San Francisco Chronicle column of 10/17/06 (pointer from Ned Deily).  Figuring this one out is a lot like solving a crossword puzzle -- and it doesn't really work in British English.

Indirect allusion can get too indirect.  Here's Gawker's complaint (passed on by Matthew Hutson on 10/10/06) about advice from a Washington Post editor asking that writers on the paper find ways to avoid "the N-word", which the editor found "almost cutesy", recommending instead something like "a well-known racial epithet":


(Compare the Times's reporting in the Isaiah Washington affair, where the offending expression -- faggot -- was alluded to as "the remark" and "the slur".)

Equally indirect is the avoidance of jackass on Fox and Friends, as reported by Jon Lighter on ADS-L 8/8/07:


In his 10/18/06 "On Language" column in the Chicago Tribune, Nathan Bierma found himself trying to explain IM chat slang without crossing over the paper's language lines.  It turned out that the people he interviewed didn't always get the message:


Jane Acheson wrote on 10/24/06 to comment on the "hilariously circumspect" approach the Boston Globe takes to dubious vocabulary, citing sport stories with


in them (the second of which took her some time to interpret).  I noted that you get rather a lot of hits for {"don't give a [care]"} and {"don't [inhale excessively]"}.

Even more obscure allusion: Jon Lighter reported on ADS-L 11/1/06 that Fox and Friends had just rebuked Barbra Streisand for using "the firetruck word" in public.  Jon noted that Google has cites back to 1999.  The expression goes back to the Turtle Club question, "What word begins with the letter F and ends with CK?"

Also on ADS-L, Barry Popik (11/9/06) quoted a 1960 Dallas Morning News article about a Texas stew known variously as "son-of-a-blankety-blank stew", "S.O.B. stew", and "Gentleman-from Odessa" or "Gent-from-Odessa stew".  The writer, Frank X. Tolbert, explained that the first two of these names used "an unfriendly term in which  it
is implied that the man receiving the insult has canine ancestry on the distaff side", and cited an informant explaining that the last two derived from the reputation of the town of Odessa:



3.  Euphemisms and technical vocabulary. 

Note Bierma's report of hell as "[heck]", above.

In a startling development, effing (originally a kind of euphemistic abbreviation) is now regarded in some quarters as intemperate language.  From a 10/26/06 House of Commons debate (pointer from Dery Earnshaw)


Assorted inventive euphemisms of the freakin' etc. type:


Technical terminology functions as a substitute in an AP story of 12/13/06 that Eric Jusino pointed me to in the Central Utah Daily Herald

For the verb, rather than the noun, here's a quote from a This Modern World cartoon by Tom Tomorrow, which I saw in the Funny Times of 2/07; TT is reviewing the events of 2006:


Then in February came the grerat hoohaa episode, in which this nursery word (or one of many variants: hoo-ha, hoo-hoo, ha-ha, etc.) is used to refer to the vagina.  The appearance of "The Hoohaa Monologues" on the marquee of a Florida theater was noted in the NYT :


Ben Zimmer was the first to post this on ADS-L, and then other posters reported occurrences of one or another variant on the TV show Ellen; in the movie Boys on the Side; in the Pussycat Dolls' song "Beep"; on South Park; on Grey's Anatomy; and from their own childhoods.  Eventually, people became to report other, non-vaginal, uses: the MAD Magazine interjection (of astonishment or triumph) hoo-hah, and the noun meaning 'fuss, to-do', in particular.


4.  "[expletive]" and related locutions. 

Beep seems to be in fashion these days.  Susan Harrelson wrote me on 10/21/06 to report a competition between asterisking and (automatic) beep:


But bleep lives on, as in this Variety story of 10/26/06 (passed on by Victor Steinbok) about NBC vs. the Dixie Chicks:


And then there's the audio bleep, turning up in extraordinary places.  Here's a report from the Telegraph of 1/27/07:


(From Ben Zimmer; longer story here.  Australian version of the story reported by Matthew Duggan.).

Automated BLEEP insertion (see the discussion of automated asterisking below) has reached new depths.  As Ben Zimmer posted to the ADS-L on 8/11/07:

Chris Waigl then discovered that


An extreme version of the "[expletive]" strategy is just to use empty square brackets, as in these excerpts from the redacted transcript of a taped conversation between Bob Woodward and Richard Armitage, in evidence at the Scooter Libby trial:


There's a lot more, but you get the drift.  (Pointer from Ben Zimmer, 2/13/07.  There's also redacted audio.)

A related usage (total omission) was reported by Scot LaFaive on ADS-L 2/24/07, re "the horse you rode in on":



5.  "The x-word".

Check out Geoff Pullum's wonderful rant of 2/2/07 on the use of "the x-word" (for various values of x) on the NPR Talk of the Nation show.


6.  Asterisks and other avoidance characters.

Chris Waigl wrote about a conspicuous use of piss on television, reported without avoidance in the Guardian News Blog of 8/25/06:


but asterisked in the Daily Mirror article that same day:


Chris (e-mail of 8/28/06) observed that the British tabloids (like the Daily Mirror) print


Here's an astonishing asterisking from Townhall.com columnist Kathleen Parker on 9/6/06 (hat tip to Victor Steinbok) -- astonishing because it defends the use of strong language while failing to reproduce that language:


Another one from Chris Waigl, from a Guardian blog:


Oh Bono, you stupid prack!

And one passed on by Ben Zimmer (8/22/07), from TheHill.com (8/21), with reference to Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska:


Then there's automated asterisking, which I wrote about here in 2006: here, here. here, and here.  On 8/8/07 on ADS-L, Wilson Gray re-discovered the wonders of automatic asterisking on iTunes, citing the tune "El P***ycat".  Joel Shaver followed up (8/11) with an oddity from the Pandora website:


Some were dubious that this should be taken seriously, but Chris Waigl pointed to the identical asterisking on (parts of) the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds site that I posted about a while back.


7.  Finally" say it with a look.

Matthew Stuckwisch (10/31/06) passed on some dialogue from the TV show Everybody Hates Chris the week before:


The expression in question is known as "cut-eye".  See, for example, John R. Rickford and Angela E. Rickford, "Cut-Eye" and "Suck-Teeth": African Words and Gestures in New World Guise (Journal of American Folklore 1976), reprinted in John Rickford's African American Vernacular English (Blackwell, 1999).

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Posted by Arnold Zwicky at August 25, 2007 04:54 PM