Nice Words for Nasty Things

This chapter surveys the linguistic landscape of taboo avoidance and its role in word loss and meaning change. Freud invoked Carl Abel’s “universal phenomenon” of Gegensinn in support of his edict that there is no no in the unconscious. Languages typically do tolerate words that bear opposed or semantically unrelated senses. Only when homonyms share the same grammatical category and context of occurrence does one of them disappear. But in the case of taboo words, “Avoid Homonymy” extends to block word senses or uses even when no confusion would plausibly occur. In this linguistic correlate of Gresham’s Law, “bad” (= taboo) meanings force out “good” (= innocent) ones and generate lexical replacements, activating the “euphemism treadmill.” The potency of linguistic taboo is also on display in the psychology of “etymythology,” which reveals more about language users than the language used.