Introduction: Beyond Bad Words

摘要

Under proscriptive regimes, like the FCCban on obscenities on broadcast television and radio, or the edicts of the royal court in Tahiti prohibiting the utterances of the king's name (Simons 1982), one can't even innocently "mention" a taboo expression, by embedding the wayward curse in a quote, for instance, without the utterance counting as a taboo "use." A pair of papers, Frekko on the avoidance of Castilian in Catalonia, and Moore on a moral panic surrounding a stigmatized dialect in Dublin, showcase unmentionable languages and "accents," units that possess much of the performative potency of swear words.