Leaky Registers and Eight-Hundred-Pound Gorillas

Abstract

Everywhere, there are topics and words that local conventions brand as "unmentionable" yet people manage to communicate about the unmentionable nevertheless. What are their strategies for doing so, and how well can those strategies work? This paper considers communicative means for mentioning or implicating the unmentionable, without actually breaching the norms that made the material noxious. Also considered are the larger cultural issues and social dramas that may be at stake. Register shifts and footing shifts are common strategies for containing noxious material in a linguistic cordon sanitaire . So is conspicuous avoidance (of the gorilla in the room). But the public game of containment is only the most overt manifestation of the issues potentially concerned. Much mischief and many unforeseen entailments lurk in the shadows of these communicative efforts. The moral life of language resides in much larger arenas than the existing literature on "verbal taboo" and politeness generally envisions. Words not spoken, discourse contexts and histories, interlocutors' responses, genre conventions, local regimes of language, truth, and knowledge—all these combine with the actual utterances, to multiple, often unforeseeable, effects.

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