Over at Language Log there has been an ongoing fascination with a particularly anthropological topic: taboos. Specifically, avoidance of taboo words and how the media handles it. For instance: @#$%, f**k, or f_ck, or, even just the letter “f” as in WT_? Not that we have any such fucking compunctions here at Savage Minds.
This post by Arnold Zwicky archives all of the related Language Log posts on the topic.
Anybody interested in this particular taboo word is well advised to read Fairman’s amazing essay on “the legal implications of the word fuck.” Or this motion to dismiss an actual court case based on the constitutionality of the word.
Linguistic taboos are an important part of Chinese speaking societies, although they are usually motivated by concerns about luck rather than politeness (although that too), as is explained by Taiwan’s Government Information Office:
Chinese folk beliefs abound with special do’s and don’ts. Most of these involve special ceremonies and events, and many taboos have to do with puns in the Chinese language. For instance, both the word for “happiness” and the word for “fish” are pronounced yu. On Chinese New Year day, a fish is cooked and set on the table, but not eaten – so that the family will enjoy a full year of fortune.
The web site lists a few examples, but the only major academic treatment of the subject that I’ve managed to find so far is an article written in 1979 which I’ll have to track down in the library since it isn’t available online:
Sung, Margaret. 1979. “Chinese language and culture: a study of homonyms, lucky words and taboos.” Journal of Chinese Linguistics 7.1:15-28.
I’ve been doing research on raw fish recipes worldwide. I discovered a Chinese tradition of eating raw fish salad on New Year. Various ingredients considered lucky are layered on a platter. Diners then push their chopsticks into the heap and with a shout of “Lo Hei,” they toss the salad into the air. When it’s thoroughly tossed, diners eat it.
This “tradition” is said to have been invented in Singapore in the mid-1960s and seems to be widespread in the Chinese diaspora. I found some websites that expressly stated that this was new, and some that wrote about it as if raw fish salad had been part of Chinese culture forever.
Funny — Leo LaPorte of twit.tv has a netcast with Dick DiBartolo of Mad Magazine (the Daily Giz Wiz) and recently asked him how he and the other Mad writers decide what symbols to use when they want their character to say $@*&! DiBartolo said that there’s no set rule, and yet, just random characters don’t quite look right. Certainly some deeper schema is at work — ()*&@$ might not seem right, but $*@% might — that nobody quite has a handle on.
Personally, a reason ()*&@$ doesn’t look right to me is because parentheses have a very special purpose. When I type a string of characters to replace a language taboo, I typically do not use brackets and parentheses. I think that, as much as possible, the characters should look arbitrary. Which is, of course, not compatible with randomness.
In French-speaking cartoons (from Belgium, especially), there’s a tendency to use “pictograms” along with characters. A skull and bones symbol is fairly typical. So is an atomic mushroom. Chinese characters are also fairly common.
Fish (yu) is a homonym for surplus (yu), not fortune. In China some buildings skip the fourth floor since four (si) is a homonym for death (si). Some internationally minded Chinese architects skip both the fourth and the thirteenth floors. Numerology is certainly in the background in China, but then some westerners worry about 13 and Friday the Thirteenth. Chinese say giving people a clock is bad (their life is ticking away) and handkerchiefs (they will need it to cry in). Once could find corresponding superstitions in the West. Isaac Newton spent as much time on Old Testament numerology as he did on Math and Physics.