degeneration of the language used in their own time. Feelings about
what is 'clean' and what is 'dirty' in language are universal, and
humankind would have to change beyond all recognition before these
urges to control and clean up the language disappeared. An integral
part of the language behaviour of every human group is the desire to
constrain and manage language, and to purge it of unwanted elements:
bad grammar, sloppy pronunciation, newfangled words, vulgar
colloquialisms, unwanted jargon and, of course, foreign items. Next
to the shamans are the self-appointed arbiters of linguistic
goodness: ordinary language users who follow the ritual, and taboo
those words and constructions they see as 'unorderly' and outside the
boundaries of what is good and proper.
Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, Forbidden Words: Taboo and the
Censoring of Language (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 124.
Quoted by Language Hat:
