Bears and why they mostly are called otherwise

Stefan Georg Georg at home.ivm.de
Sat Mar 4 16:54:45 UTC 2000


There's a lot of interesting stuff in Steve's message, and I only want to
throw in a tiny remark:

>Two schools of thought here - one says the bear stood for dread.  The other
>says that the bear stood for a warm bear skin -

Well, the taboo coin has two sides: one is: tabooize any names for
things/animals/neighbours you fear, and, do so for those who want to get
hold of. *If* you specialize in bear hunting, and *if* you have the brains
to outsmart and the weapons to barbecue Old Misha, and *if* you have
reasons to believe that he might be in the know about that, then, well,
you'd *again* rather use a cover term for him, since, if the smaller furry
creatures of the forest whisper in his ears what they overheard when near
your village, viz. that you and your chums are contemplating to have a
really juicy piece of bear-paw for dinner, followed by some first-class
skinning (no, the other way round) he might chose to retreat into the
thicket, spoiling your feast.

One of the bases for lexical taboo is thus: to avoid that the creature in
question hears its "real" name mentioned and is able to draw any
conclusions from that. It works both ways, and both schools of thought can
be happy with it.

Dr. Stefan Georg
Heerstraße 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
Tel./Fax +49-228-691332



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