Like a Very Drab

Abstract

T A TIME when, in our country, all linguistic taboos, both of speech and of writing, are being broken, it is fitting to reexamine the nature of such taboos, their origin, and their social and psychological meanings. Linguistic taboos exist in every culture. Among primitive peoples many words are the exclusive property of the priests or the elders, unpronounceable sometimes even by them, and spoken by outsiders under pain of death. In the premodern era, before telephone, radio, and television began to break down linguistic barriers, it was axiomatic that in any long-settled country each social level was certain to develop a way of speaking peculiar to itself, that status dialects as well as geographical dialects came into existence with predictable regularity, and that courtly speech inevitably gained in prestige at the expense of all other ways of speaking and often acquired the ambivalence of a taboo object-outsiders simultaneously admiring it and fearing to trespass on it. Even today in some Asian countries taboo and honorific expressions so proliferate as to make communication between social levels difficult if not impossible; the kingly and sacerdotal classes speak one way, the vulgar another. Thus Michel Peissel, the French anthropologist, despite months of laborious study of popular Tibetan, found, after penetrating into a nearly inaccessible mountain kingdom, that he needed an interpreter to communicate with the king.1 In medieval Europe too there were linguistic class markers: not only did status dialects develop within each nation but an international prestige language, Latin, rose above them all, with the result that non-Latinists went about with the uncomfortable stigma of barbarism. In all such cases the higher-level language was taboo for the lower classes-resented, distrusted, avoided, admired, and not understood, all at the same time. But the lower-level language was not taboo for the higher classes. Luther could translate the Bible into the vernacular but a Saxon peasant could not read the mass. (An analogy might be drawn with hypergamy, the mating of an upper-caste man