"dope" and taboo (was: COKE in the Maryland)

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:39 PM -0500 3/4/05, Bethany K. Dumas wrote:
>On Fri, 4 Mar 2005 RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
>
>>>  The synonymous "dope," however, seems to be on the way out used anymore -
>>>  perhaps for obvious reasons.
>
>Let's not give it a premature funeral. Though its use is contextually and
>otherwise restricted, it is in fact still used.
>
>Bethany

as we'd expect with taboo avoidance; cf. jackass.  Or the fact that
the French still use _baiser_ ('to fuck') with its original meaning
('kiss') as a noun, or in contextually disambiguated verbal contexts
(_baiser la main_).

Larry


(Of course, some might argue that speakers know that _baiser_
*really* still has just the one sense of 'kiss', but is just *used in
a shorthand way* to mean 'fuck'...)