 No word can be completely forbidden. If no one is ever allowed to say a word under any circumstances, then children never hear it when they're going up, so they never learn it, and after a couple generations, everyone who remembered it will have died, and it won't be a word in that language anymore. In fact, the more people know a word, the stronger the rule against it can be, because if everyone knows a word, then when someone says it, everyone can immediately participate in punishing them. But for people to learn the word in the first place, there have to be some circumstances where it's permissible, or at least tolerated. What all this means is that I'm probably not going to be telling you any words you don't already know, at least in English, so if you came here for any huge surprises on that front, you might be disappointed. But I still think it's really interesting and counterintuitive that there are so many words that we have in our language, but you're not really supposed to use. And not only that, but the presence of words like that seems like it might be universal to all languages. There's a lot of ways of categorizing these words, but I think the most useful way to sort them is by why people think you shouldn't say them in the first place, which gets you about three types of forbidden words. Eh, before I go on, fair warning. I'm going to be saying, like, all of these words, or at least all of the ones in English. I won't be using them exactly, but I am going to be saying them so that we all know what we're talking about. So, eh, viewer discretion advised. Alright, the first type of forbidden words are the ones where it's probably easiest to understand why people would want to avoid them. Blasphemous words. These are usually the names of some sort of supernatural entity, a god, or spirit, or angel, or demon, or something like that. It's really common in cultures around the world for people to think that saying the name of something like this will call its attention to you, and, perhaps depending on how respectfully you said it, possibly anger them. Therefore, if you want them to like you, it's best not to call their attention to you frivolously, and if you want them to ignore you, it's probably best to just never say their name at all. We don't really have words like this in English anymore, but boy did we used to. In the Middle Ages, same words like God, or Jesus, or Hell, or Devil was taken very seriously by both the church and the state, and was often illegal. But my favorite example of this type of word is from Hebrew. Religious Jews from ancient times and up to today will go way out of the way to never, ever say Yahweh, which is basically the most direct possible name for God in Hebrew. They don't even write it unless they're making a copy of the Bible, which makes it probably the strictest prohibition on a word I'm going to talk about in this video. I could give more examples, but this category is pretty self-explanatory, so let's move on to the second type of forbidden word. This one is easily the one that's most confusing to me. You see, in a lot of languages, maybe even all of them, they're taboo words that refer to something having to do with either sex or excrement, either referring to those things directly, or referring to things that the culture deemed somehow related. Words like this in English include shit, piss, fuck, cock, and cunt, just to name a few of the worst ones. Oddly enough, though, these words are rarely used in their literal sense. When someone says fuck or fucking, they're actually talking about sex maybe one time out of a hundred. The rest of the time, they've probably either stubbed their toe or they're losing at Mario Kart. What interests me most about these words is that everyone agrees they shouldn't be said in certain circumstances, but very few people have clear beliefs about why. It seems kind of like wearing pants in public. Everyone does it because everyone else does it. Anybody can imagine a society where no one wears pants, and nothing necessarily seems wrong with it, but nobody wants to be the first person to try it. I'd really like to be able to tell you the historical circumstances that lead to words like this, but unfortunately there's not much research into this area. A decent amount has been written about the origin of these particular English words, but similar words exist in loads of other languages, and I honestly have no idea how much of what happened in English is applicable to other languages. So with that disclaimer, here's what happened in English. In the beginning, and by beginning I mean about 1500, these words didn't have any stigma at all. They were direct, but not vulgar, kind of like today's words penis and vagina. Words which, by the way, didn't exist at the time, and were only borrowed from Latin in the 1600s. So what changed between then and now? A lot, but three main things. Firstly, there were a lot of people, especially around the Protestant Reformation, who thought that naming things having to do with sex directly would inspire lust, and therefore sin. So they did their best to talk about them in a super roundabout way. Someone after that, but also kind of simultaneous with it, people started avoiding talking about sex and excrement altogether. This was especially true in the Victorian era, when even the word leg was considered by some to be too sexually suggestive for public use. Thirdly, some people saw it as a class marker. The middle class in England at the time used their avoidance of these words as a way to differentiate themselves from the lower classes, who they thought used them more freely. Squeemishness around sex and poop, as well as class divisions, certainly aren't unique to the English-speaking world, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if these are where swear words come from in other languages as well. But on the other hand, it's a sample size of one, so who knows. Now we come to the last type of forbidden word, which, unlike the other two, I actually fully endorse the prohibition against. These words are slurs. Words which refer to some category of people, while also attaching a strong negative value judgment to those people. The most common and widely studied of these words refer to ethnic and racial groups, so I'm gonna focus mostly on them in this video. Although similar words refer to sexual orientation, gender, religion, disability, and all kinds of stuff. Words like this in English include chink, coon, spick, gook, packy, and of course, negro, variously pronounced nigger or niga. Anyway, there's actually a few slightly different theories as to what exactly makes these words so bad. Most of them revolve around the idea that these words are somehow connected both to a group of people and to a series of negative stereotypes about that people. I think that's pretty clear from the fact that some people use the n word to refer to black people without any negative judgment intended, while others use it to refer to people who fit properties traditionally associated with black people regardless of that person's race. For some, the word only means the category of people, and for others, it only means the stereotypes, but for most people, it's at least connected to both. But how exactly it's connected to both is a matter of debate. Some scholars have argued that the category of people and the negative value judgment are all contained in a slur's literal meaning. It's kind of like how the word penguin refers to flightless, black-and-white animals with wings and beaks and flippers that lay eggs and live in Antarctica. If you use the word penguin to refer to something, it suggests that you think that penguins are a thing. That these traits, which aren't necessarily logically related, tend to cluster with each other in the real world, so something with a few of them is probably a penguin and will therefore have all of the other qualities of a penguin as well. In the same way, some people think that slurs refer to categories that both include the ethnic group and stereotypes about that ethnic group, so that using the slur suggests that these properties naturally belong together. Not everyone agrees with this analysis, though. Another theory is that slurs literally refer only to the category of people, but that they also carry some sort of evaluative connotation, kind of like how exit the building promptly and get out now! Literally mean the same thing, but imply radically different emotions on the part of the speaker. In the same way, this theory says that there's a gay guy over there and there's a f***ed over there. Literally mean the same thing, but one implies that the speaker has negative attitudes towards gay people and the other doesn't. There's a lot of subtle variations on both of these theories, and they tend to struggle with the fact that different people clearly use these words in different ways. For instance, the phenomenon of members of the targeted group using a slur as a mock insult amongst themselves to acknowledge their shared community has been talked about at length by people much smarter than me. Different theories explain all this in different ways, but one thing that they all agree on is that most of the time, the people who these words target feel attacked when people not in that group direct it towards them, which makes sense when you consider the fact that lots of people have used and continued to use these words for the specific purpose of attacking them. I hope you don't need a rigorous linguistic analysis to see the logic in that. That said, I hope the educational value of this video outweighs any discomfort I might have caused by saying these words. Not just the slurs, but also the religious swears and profanity. I'm sorry if anything I send this video bothered you or offended you, and I promise my next video won't feature such a touchy topic. See you then!