Topical Taboos

Ever find yourself in an unintended verbal trap?

Maybe you’re at Thanksgiving dinner with your extended family, and everyone is staring at you because you brought up a recent election. Or, you’re at the office and talking with a colleague about salaries, and everyone stops what they’re doing to stare at you until you stop discussing the thing you’re discussing.

We haven’t always had a descriptive word for these sorts of topics in English, but today we do: taboo.

Just one year after the American Revolution (and the publication of The Wealth of Nations), Captain James Cook visited the island of Tonga on an expedition to map the islands in the Pacific Ocean. Here’s a map showing the UK (that big squiggly orange one at the top) and Tonga (the green dot at the bottom right).

Wikipedia

Here in Tonga, Cook found a rich and vibrant culture that was similar to his own in many ways, but notably different in one respect: certain objects or activities were strictly off-limits. They were considered sacred, but there was a certain element of danger embedded in them, so that everyone was uneasy around these things the locals called tapu.

Cook was careful to record his observations in his journal, which an eager public back home would devour like that first season of Squid Game. It’s no wonder, then, that the word tapu (Anglicized as taboo) spread rapidly through the English speaking world.

There’s no definitive list of the Top Ten Taboos™ in the US, but here are some of the most commonly mentioned ones, based on my own observations and a little research:

• Money (personal finance)

• Sex (and Sexuality)

• National politics

• Racism (or even ethnicity, depending on where you are)

• Religious belief

• Mental Health

• Physical Appearance and Weight

• Personal Health Issues

• Death and Dying

• Gun Control

Violating a taboo when you don’t know you’re doing it can be like stepping on a landmine and hearing a click. You don’t want to move your weight off of the triggering mechanism, so you just freeze in place. The click happens when you realize you’ve spoken about one of those unmentionable subjects.

I’ve fallen into some of these traps over the years. Part of this is that I’m always trying to push right up to the boundary of whatever discussion we’re having; otherwise, haven’t you had the same conversation before? In other words, I like to ask questions that truly make people pause and think.

At other times, I’ll just step on one of those landmines without quite realizing it. I once realized that a student’s credit card had expired, so I asked him if he could give me updated info. Unfortunately for me, I did this in front of other students. I didn’t reckon there was any big deal to updating information, assuming the card had inadvertently expired, or something else innocuous was at play.

This was me projecting my own view onto the situation. People are very sensitive about money, and one reason a credit card doesn’t go through is that it gets declined due to the cardholder’s inability to pay the balance. That aspect hadn’t occurred to me, but it should have: it’s taboo.

I think we’ve all stepped on our own landmines over the years, from religion to politics at the Thanksgiving table. If you’re comfortable sharing today, I’d love to hear from you about what your own inadvertent taboos have been.