Taboo replacements

[Robert Whiting]

On Fri, 9 Apr 1999 Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote:

>Nicholas Widdows wrote:

>>Or are they somehow morphologically marked? I know
>>respect/avoidance language is widely used in the bear-hunting
>>North (see Joseph Campbell on the Ainu), but might we not expect
>>new terms like "well-intentioned one" or "your excellency" rather
>>than the merely prosaic "it's big and it's brown and it likes a
>>jar of hunny"?

>When one looks at lexical replacement for 'bear' in North
>America for taboo/respect reasons, one finds the fairly
>pedestrian replacements mentioned above or borrowed words, not
>the "your mighty greatness" variety.

<snip of lexical data>

>All of these groups have a taboo respect for bear, but none of
>the lexical replacements for older forms shows any particularly
>high-brow form for the new word.  In fact, look at the ways that
>Americans replace the name of "God" in casual speech--"the man
>upstairs", for example.  I would say that a taboo replacement is
>probably MORE likely to be a pedestrian form than something
>special.  After all, one needs a word to use in casual speech
>without the respect inherent in the taboo form.

The classic example of this (hunting-taboo replacement by a more
general word) is often taken from English "deer", originally the
general Germanic word for 'wild animal' (cf. Ger. "Tier") which
by being used as a euphemism for the hunted animal has come to be
specialized in that meaning, with the original meaning being
taken up by loanwords ("animal, beast").

On the other hand, or on the other side of the hunter/hunted
line, the original general word for 'dog', "hound" (cf. Ger.
"Hund"), has come to be specialized as a term for 'hunting dog'
in English, presumably through a sort of reverse taboo ("you
can't call that thing a hound") and the general word has been
replaced by "dog" (of unknown origin) and the now more
prestigious "hound" reserved for hunters.  Thus "riding to
hounds" is hardly the same as a "dog and pony show" (to hunters
at least).

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi