‘Quick, darling, you’re missing the last taboo,’ shouted my husband from the drawing-room with the television on, as I was working in the kitchen.
‘Quick, darling, you’re missing the last taboo,’ shouted my husband from the drawing-room with the television on, as I was working in the kitchen. He is a collector of last taboos. Once, it was death. Since there’s been geriatric sex (when he loudly complained of the misuse of geriatric), sex-change surgery live, The Vagina Monologues, Tourettism and Joan Bakewell.
Yet linguistic taboos about race, sex (‘gender’) and disability have multiplied, despite the popularity of ever more ingeniously obscene slang. On the same principle as Wikipedia, these swell the online Urban Dictionary weekly. It claims to have published 5,198,891 definitions since 1999, not all obscene. Thus, someone proposed gay buffer to mean ‘an extra seat left between you and a person of the same sex in a cinema so as not to appear gay’. In response, readers gave 10,409 thumbs up and 2,333 thumbs down.
In print, Viz magazine’s latest 624-page edition of Roger’s Profanisaurus (named after Roger Mellie, the man on the telly) is called Das Krapital. It is hard to quote because it truly is obscene. But fans of gay buffer may like the terms good with colours, puddle-jumper, spud fumbler, or German ambassador (after the German word Botschafter).
I’ve found, from hearing men shouting in pubs which my husband took me to, that the explosive element in a taboo torpedo is not the noun but the adjective attached. You may call this Wordsworth’s Law. Even the terrible c-word is thus modified. It is ‘You dirty c***’; ‘You stupid c***.’ George Cornell was shot in the Blind Beggar not because he called Ronnie Kray a poof, but because he called him a fat poof.
Fat remains an adjective that still evades the attentions of the law, presumably because it relates to unhealthiness, and health is the new morality. Otherwise, even calling someone a Welsh idiot is risky.
But the biggest new taboo is against identifying failure. It is not just the 97.6 A-level pass rate. Management gurus even ban the use of feedback, preferring feedforward, which is deemed to focus on future success. So my recommendation for something to shout next time a motor-car nudges your bicycle is: ‘You fat failure!’
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