Taboo Words

In words, as in bathing suits and men's manners toward women, taboos change with the times. Fifty years ago the word leg was not used in polite mixed company. Today, at respectable dinner tables, words are casually uttered that would make Victorians blush, blanch or burst. Last week a college professor made a scientific report on the use of words that are still "socially questionable" in some circles.*

To find out how much basis there is for "the current impression that the present generation of youth has no inhibitions in relation to word use as well as otherwise," Professor Edwin R. Hunter (head of the English department) and Student Bernice E. Gaines examined the freshman class, seniors and the faculty in Maryville College, a small co-educational institution in east Tennessee. They chose 62 words that once were or still are widely considered offensive, asked the students and teachers to indicate whether they used the words: 1) as freely as cat or dog, 2) with a feeling of being bold or modern, 3) only when talking to intimates, 4) never if they could avoid it, or 5) never under any circumstances.

The investigators found the college freshmen most finicky, the seniors most free-spoken, the faculty betwixt & between. The women had more taboo words than the men. Some of the words, and the proportion of each group that used them freely:

Coffin: freshmen 89%, seniors 96%, faculty 90%, men 89%, women 90%.

Corset: freshmen 47%, seniors 57%. faculty 51%, men 58%, women 42%.

Guts: freshmen 16%, seniors 22%, faculty 18%, men 27%, women 10%.

Pregnant: freshmen 21%, seniors 43%, faculty 50%, men 26%, women 29%.

Prostitute: freshmen 24%, seniors 48%, faculty 48%, men 35%, women 29%.

Whore: freshmen 9%, seniors 15%, faculty 8%, men 11%, women 8%.

Bastard: freshmen 8%, seniors 20%, faculty 39%, men 12%, women 16%.

Bitch (most taboo of the list) : freshmen 7%, seniors 9%, faculty 17%, men 10%, women 7%.

Last week, in The Bronx, detectives haled before Magistrate Frank Oliver seven newsdealers, charged them with selling a magazine, For Men Only, containing three "obscene" words. When the defendants' lawyers showed that one or more of the words had also been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, some 20 books in the city's public library, Shakespeare and the Bible, the magistrate ruled the words were not obscene, dismissed the charge. The New York World-Telegram and Herald Tribune, carefully reporting to their readers that one of the words appeared in verse 7 of chapter 21 in the Book of Leviticus, ostentatiously refrained from mentioning them. The legal words: whore, whorehouse, hump.

-Vcrbal Taboo in a College Community, by Edwin R. Hunter and Bernice E. Gaines, in American Speech, a quarterly (Columbia University Press).

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