‘Quick, darling, you’re missing the last taboo,’ shouted my husband from the drawing-room with the television on, as I was working in the kitchen.
‘Quick, darling, you’re missing the last taboo,’ shouted my husband from the drawing-room with the television on, as I was working in the kitchen. He is a collector of last taboos. Once, it was death. Since there’s been geriatric sex (when he loudly complained of the misuse of geriatric), sex-change surgery live, The Vagina Monologues, Tourettism and Joan Bakewell.
Yet linguistic taboos about race, sex (‘gender’) and disability have multiplied, despite the popularity of ever more ingeniously obscene slang. On the same principle as Wikipedia, these swell the online Urban Dictionary weekly. It claims to have published 5,198,891 definitions since 1999, not all obscene. Thus, someone proposed gay buffer to mean ‘an extra seat left between you and a person of the same sex in a cinema so as not to appear gay’.
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