January 2007 Talking about words: Erasing words By Richard W. Bailey
In 1955, Jessica Mitford, an English aristocrat who had exiled herself to America, wrote to her husband that one of her sisters had emerged as a "you know what bian." (A volume of her fascinating letters was published in 2006.) What is gained by replacing les with you know what? For one thing, it avoids the peril of the law (for using "fighting words") or of the rules of the NBA (by using a word that gets you thrown out of the basketball game.) For another, you-know-what-bian takes some of the sting out of the word by being funny. Allen Walker Read (1906-2002), a professor fascinated by the English language, called such euphemisms "ostentatious taboos." By using these circumlocutions, we technically avoid putting ourselves at risk. On the other hand, you can show that you and your listener know about you-know-what. Nudge, nudge. F-word is one familiar example. But there is a rich history of substituting for the forbidden. In 1948, the publishers of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead persuaded him to use fug instead of the word he had written in his manuscript. Another way around the trouble was in earlier literary use: F or eff—particularly in the form effing. The editor of the great historical dictionary of American slang, Jon Lighter, calls forms like effing "partial euphemisms." Eighteenth-century England was a particularly rich period for such partial euphemisms. Here's an exchange from Frances Burney's novel Evelina (1778) in which someone has proposed going to the entertainments at Ranleigh Gardens. Inserting hyphens, asterisks, and other nonalphabetic characters did the job of making Devil a word that could be seen if not heard. The word looked less offensive even though it could not be pronounced. Skirting the edge of the taboo can be done in another way: by the use of innocent words in place of offensive ones. In the "graphic novels" about Tintin—in my youth these were called "comic books"—one of the characters, Captain Haddock, has a terrific temper and is given to abusing people whose conduct he finds objectionable. He does so with words that are real words but seldom encountered as terms of abuse. One of his favorites is anacoluthon—a figure of speech based upon inconsistency and incoherence. When the Captain includes anacoluthon in one of his tirades, the word itself describes his speech. Here's a typical specimen of his verbal anger from Destination Moon (1953): "Sea-gherkin!...Pirate!... Logarithm! ...Ectoplasm!...Baboon!" Only one of these comes close to being a fighting word. The others are innocent nonsense. For all our national love for First Amendment rights, the case of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942) still stands as a U. S. Supreme Court precedent. Fighting words are not protected by the Constitution: one of the facts being litigated in that case was whether or not someone might call another a "damned racketeer." New Hampshire had a law against such public abuse, and the Supreme Court upheld it. Fortunately, we can avoid the penalties of the law by erasing words through ostentatious taboos or partial euphemisms. We can get away with it if we angrily call people a "damned you-know-what-eteer" or write denouncing them as a "d---d racketeer." We can satisfy our urge for verbal anger most simply by shouting: "Anacoluthon."
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Richard W. Bailey is Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. His latest publication (co-edited with Colette Moore and Marilyn Miller) is an edition of a chronicle of daily life in London written by a merchant in the middle of the sixteenth century. This electronic book incorporates images of the manuscript, a transcript of the writing it contains, and a modernization of the text for easy reading. Thanks to the University of Michigan Library and the University Press, the work is freely available to all:
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