Unword of the Day : R*******

rohingya     Rohingya    rohingya   ROHINGYA

    Rohingya     rohingya       rohingya    

rohingya     Rohingya    rohingya   ROHINGYA

    Rohingya     rohingya       rohingya   

rohingya     Rohingya    rohingya   ROHINGYA

    Rohingya     rohingya       rohingya   

rohingya     Rohingya    rohingya   ROHINGYA

                Rohingya     rohingya       rohingya   

Forbidden word of the day: “allochthone”

Our favorite radio essayist, M. Fouad Laroui, reports a strange story of linguistic politicization:  the banning, by Holland and Belgium, of the rather scholarly-looking and politically quite innocent word allochthone:

Un mot interdit

Now, allochthone is the antonym of autochthone, as you can tell by the prefixes, borrowed from Greek: allo- ‘other’, auto- ‘self, same’.  The root chthon- means ‘earth’ and appears in the learnèd English word chthonic.    Neither word is common in English, but autochthone is quite common in French.  Harrap’s defines it as ‘native’, and allochthone as ‘immigrant’.

Given its forbiddingly philological-Hellenistic hue, the word allochthone would seem as unlikely a target for political hysteria as, say, shibboleth or postlapsarian.   Yet such is the case today:  the word is legally banned;  anyone who uses it may be subject to punishment.

How did this come about?   As Laroui explains it,  the word itself is innocent enough but came to be soiled by the mouths that uttered it.   Just as, in America, the wingnuts came to use the term “liberal” (whose core meaning is something like ‘generous’) as a sneer-word, a hate-filled epithet, so the likes of Geert Wilders (of “scum villages” ill-fame) has used the Dutch version of allochthone invidiously, in his diatribes against immigrants.   And now -- just as they did in the “scum villages” affair -- the palladins of political correctitude have over-reacted and over-reached, with a tyranny that comes naturally to the self-righteous.

That the word is, von Hause aus, entirely blameless, can be seen in such passages as the following, picked almost at random:

Das Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau (SCP), eines der wichtigsten Beratungsorgane der niederländischen Regierung, hat am heutigen Tage eine Studie veröffentlicht, aus welcher hervorgeht, dass autochthone Niederländer von Zeitarbeitsfirmen bevorzugt werden. Während 28% der nicht-westlichen Allochthonen, die sich bei einer Zeitarbeitsfirma persönlich vorstellen, einen Job angeboten bekommen, liegt die Quote bei autochthonen Niederländern …

http://nlpolitik.wordpress.com/tag/allochthone/

Hmm… As an experiment, let us take a somewhat scholarly word, and see if we can similarly besmirch it:

“Donald Trump is nothing but a sniveling, low-down mercantilist !!!”

~

[Update 8 March 2015]  Fouad Laroui reports another editorialist’s call to suppress the use of a word:  in this case, islamophobie.   Docking a word, says Laroui, you cripple thought itself, “ce qui est propre de l’homme:   L’homme  nomme.”

Banned in France

We earlier reprinted the cover of a comic book parody, Banned in Belgium.  And you are all by now familiar with the French-condemned gesture of la quenelle.

Here is the latest forbidden image;  tweeting it in France  brought a hefty fine and a prison sentence to the satirist.

[Trigger Warning:  very very bad !!]

[Disclaimer:  If you lie within the long reach of French law, you are strictly forbidden from viewing this.]

.

.

.

.

.

.

Bike-time for Bonzo

 

(That one gives a whole new meaning to the expression “dirty French postcards”.)

Some French observers objected to the harsh sentence handed down (though many bien-pensants objected that it was too lenient):

Alors que nombre d’hommes politiques se voient ridiculisés de la même manière par des dessins agressifs voire odieux (Le Pen, Sarkozy, et autrefois Mitterrand par exemple).

http://medias-presse.info/repression-policiere-les-meandres-europeens/15328

That objection, however, ignores the Fundamental Tenet of the French Legal System:

Un Poids -- Deux Mesures

(Translation:  Don’t you dare put the goose-sauce on that gander!)

Since, however, we ourselves are not subject to Gallic interdictions, we herewith reproduce some other pleasant depictions of our primate cousins astride a bike.

Appreciate your American freedoms, while they last.   In France, those could land you in jail.

*

Si cela vous parle,

savourez la série noire

en argot authentique d’Amérique :

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justiceexcerptdivorce.html

.

F-Word of the Day: “fournée”

[Update 18 September 2014]  What the “F-word” is, depends on where you live.   Here, the latest from Switzerland:

Der dunkle Schatten des F-Worts

Mit dem Faschismusvorwurf verschärfen die SP und die BDP ihre politische Gangart markant.

«Die Politik der SVP der letzten Monate hat klar faschistoide Tendenzen», sagte Levrat. Damit ist Levrat nach BDP-Präsident Landolt der zweite Chef einer Bundesratspartei, der die SVP in die Faschismus-Ecke stellt.

http://www.nzz.ch/schweiz/der-dunkle-schatten-des-f-worts-1.18385772

[Below, the original essay]

[Trigger warning:  This philological note may contain some very, very bad words.  You must be over 21 to read this.  No, make that 31.   91.   In fact -- Don’t read it at all.   Place your head back in the sand, and all will be well.]

Awhile back, there was a kerfuffle over a certain traditional word meaning ‘stingy’, public utterance of which caused one hapless speechmaker to lose his job:

SO WE'RE ALL COOL WITH "niggardly" NOW.

______________UH ... AREN'T WE?

______BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK |

Last week, locking up the illiterate and hard-of-hearing vote, Washington Mayor Anthony Williams accepted ombudsman David Howard's resignation for having used the word "niggardly" (correctly, to mean "miserly") in front of co-workers, who misinterpreted it as related to …

(here the manuscript breaks off).

Now, the word in question, which is attested in print as far back as 1571,  is both etymologically and semantically quite unrelated to the dreaded N-word.  The current purely phonetically-engendered taboo upon it (for taboo there is, make no mistake)is of a kind unusual for American English, but well-attested in some other languages such as Chinese or certain dialects of North Africa, where phonetic similarity to some ill-omened word  (e.g. the word for ‘death’, or the same of someone who is believed to have recently died by sorcery, etc.)  has doomed large numbers of vocables. (Some languages experience a very large turnover in vocabulary, generation after generation, for just this reason.)

~

All France is now atwitter over this:

In a video posted on the National Front’s website and later removed, Mr. Le Pen, 85, lashed out against several of his critics, including the former tennis champion Yannick Noah and the pop star Madonna. When questioned about the French singer Patrick Bruel, who is Jewish and has been critical of the National Front, Mr. Le Pen said: “We’ll include him in the next batch.” In the comment, Mr. Le Pen used the French word “fournée,” which refers to a batch of bread to be baked, and was interpreted by his critics to be a reference to crematories at Nazi death camps.

Ms. Le Pen said that her father had made a “political error” in making his latest remarks, even as she told Le Figaro, the French newspaper, that the “meaning given to his comments is a malicious interpretation.”

“It is they who have made a political mistake, not me,” Mr. Le Pen told the French broadcaster RMC. The comments threatened to widen an intergenerational rift in the National Front

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/world/europe/apparent-anti-semitic-pun-from-national-fronts-jean-marie-le-pen-draws-criticism.html?hp

It is rare indeed for the N.Y. Times  actually to quote a French politician’s actual words (or, here, word), in the original French -- even though, without the original language, the reader often cannot possibly assess the nuances of what is really going on.  (We have discussed such examples here:

            allochthone;

            pov’con;

            Euro-Tartuffe;

            ultralaïcard; …)

So, we are given the word, fournée, which is correctly rendered as ‘batch of bread’ (even more correctly than the reporter perhaps knew, since the word batch is etymologically related to bake;  see below), since, if all that the American readers had been told was that M. Le Pen had referred to a “batch of bread” and left it at that, they would have been baffled.    Still, as it is, the article is linguistically incompetent, since unless you know French, you still won’t quite grasp what the deal is.   Knowing more about the word  makes M. Le Pen’s statement both more sinister … and less.  Allow us to elucidate.

What the Times does not tell you is that, outside of the baking community, the commoner meaning of fournée is as follows (quoting from the Bordas Dictionnaire de la langue française):

Ensemble de personnes qui partagent le même sort au même moment, ou bien qui arrivent ensemble.  Une nouvelle de touristes descendait de l’autocar pour visiter le château.  La fournée de nouveaux promus.

Example:

Pendant quelque temps  fonctionna le système des « fournées », qui permettait, grâce à des fêtes sur lesquelles on faisait le silence, de convier les réprouvés à venir se divertir entre eux, ce qui dispensait de les inviter avec les gens bien.

-- Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe

 

Given that, and given that neither Yannick Noah nor Madonna is Jewish, nor was Bruel’s ethnicity alluded to by the speaker, the reader will now be wondering what all the fuss is about -- the outcry seems even more bogus than the one that brought down the hapless ombudsman.   M. Le Pen seems to be saying, “It’ll be Bruel’s turn next time.”

To understand why the outcry, requires a tad of etymology. 

Now, there are lots of words that sound similar to fournée:  fournir (‘to furnish’, and part of the source of our own word furnish), fourni ‘well-supplied’ (or: ‘bushy’, said of a beard), fourniture (related to the English word furniture), and so forth.  But among them is four ‘oven’ -- and indeed this, unlike the others, is etymologically related to fournée (ultimately from Latin).  Whence the instant outcry.

Some American readers who don’t follow French politics  may still be nonplussed.  You need to know that Le Pen père has a reputation for anti-Semitism, and that he has plenty of detractors, waiting for him open-mouthed, like primed mousetraps, for him to put a foot wrong.  Gotcha!

Now, if Le Pen had been wittier in his riposte, he would have said:

“Ils se sont … f-f-f-fourvoyés dans leur analyse sémantique!”

[Update 11 juin 2014] How sharper than a serpent's tooth ...

Le président d'honneur du FN, qui multiplie les piques à l'encontre de sa fille

Jean-Marie Le Pen se vengera-t-il du parricide politique dont il se dit «victime» après ses propos invitant à «une fournée» d'artistes? Interrogé par Le Scan, le président d'honneur du Front national assure qu'il «prendra ses responsabilités et donnera ses instructions» lors du prochain congrès du parti.

http://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/le-scan/citations/2014/06/10/25002-20140610ARTFIG00353-sans-nouvelles-de-sa-fille-jean-marie-le-pen-entre-en-resistance.php

For the larger picture, consult our essay on intellectual heirs -- acolytes. 

[Update 31 July 2014]   And now in Germany -- this time a case of non-verbal politico-semiotics:

The Jewish community was shocked by photographs taken at a Berlin demonstration last week where the clothes of children were brushed with red paint. To some, such images allude to the death of Palestinian children in the Israeli strikes on Gaza. But Jewish leaders here have condemned them as a revival of anti-Semitic myths that paint Jews as child killers who used their victims’ blood in religious rituals.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the-israeli-palestinian-conflict-spills-into-europe-with-protests-anti-jewish-slogans/2014/07/30/36ca8d41-b5a4-4790-9b53-c94e75da4ba6_story.html

I have no idea whether attribution to Germans generally, of a memory of the blood-libel, is realistic or not.   This knowledge lives on, to be sure, among Jews and folklorists -- it was strictly in an academic context, while studying literature from the age of Chaucer, that I learned of the thing.   Certainly your average American, whose collective memory extends back no further than Season 1 of “Mad Men”, would not have a clue what you are talking about.   But there are, indeed, parts of the world, in which the Unfinished Business of History looms large in preconsciousness -- particularly, among Muslims of the Middle East.  (For an excellent discussion, cf. Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam.)

[Update 8 August 2014]  “All Things Considered” just broadcast a useful report from France by Eleanor Beardsly. She asked a French rabbi whether he held the Front National responsible for the upsurge of (sometimes violent) antisemitism in France.  “He just laughed”:  The perps in the recent attacks, he explained, are overwhelmingly immigrant “Muslim, African, and North African” -- less FN than FLN, as it were.  As for the FN, it is more worried about precisely that population, than about long-assimilated Jews.

Politics-and-language note:

That piece, though it did not go deep, was somewhat startling in actually naming ethnicities, rather than just referring to “des jeunes”, which is the French media codeword when Maghrebis get out of line.   (Off course, this may have less to do with any courage on the part of NPR, than the fact that the roster of taboo topics  differs from country to country.) Additionally, Ms Beardsly added another bit of profiling, when she reported that, at the end of a recent demonstration, “the male protesters” broke loose can commited acts of vandalism.  Not:  “the protesters, who were mostly men” or what have you.   In fact, the detail added is in some ways so odd, that I wonder whether it was not so much a swipe at the masculine gender, as a crytpo-French reference to, precisely, “les jeunes” (al-shabaab).

Word of the Day: “manure”

(And if you are already inclined to titter, that proves my point.)

Frequently to be met with, in these troublous times, is this quote from Thomas Jefferson (1787 -- thus, somewhat before the French revolution -- they took him at his word):

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

We shall not comment on the current use of this phrase to justify some rather ill-advised assassinations, for our point here  is purely linguistic.

What you will seldom meet, is the co-text.  The very next sentence reads:

It is its natural manure.

In this case, the quoters may be fully excused for omitting that continuation.

Jefferson was writing for a highly educated and restricted 18^th-century audience (indeed, the quotation in question  stems from a private letter).    He was not addressing the latter-day louts and yahoos  raised on “Animal House” and cable TV, for whom ‘manure’ means neither more nor less than excrement (and more likely to be flung, than planted).

An honorable man of metaphor;  no scatologist, he 

What, then,  is the linguistic landscape  here?  Any well-read person of our own day, knows that the word manure  is often used specifically for said substance as used for botanical fertilizer.  Jefferson was obviously alluding to this latter use.  But was he thereby averting his gaze (and trusting that his readers would likewise avert theirs) from a concrete central meaning -- the way, if we metaphorically refer to a statesman as an “eagle”, say, we wish purely to point to a kind of soaring nobility, and nowise to suggest that the fellow moults or eats mice?   To imagine that, is to get the semantic evolution  exactly backwards.

It is not the case that Jefferson was here bracketing an original defectatory sense  for the benefit of a metaphorical extension, the way (in the hippie era) “get your shit together” came to mean “get your act together (get your ducks in a row)” with no real excretory reference.   Rather, the excremental sense of the word manure is itself purely secondary -- indeed tertiary.   In origin, the word has nothing to do with that, indeed not even immediately to do with fertilizer of any variety. (Compare, mutatis mutandis, German Jauche.)  The word is cognate with our word manouevre (borrowed from French; a term in no wise redolent of the outhouse), and in terms of its Latin etymology  means  ‘handiwork’ (cf. manual, operate).

~

So, semantically, what has come to pass?

In the blandest, most schematic sense, we have here a case of specialization, followed by a familiar variety of metonymy (concrete for abstract [**]);  but that is of little interest.   What we wish to emphasize is that the evolution here is not a case of either euphemism or dysphemism, as you might imagine if you were under the misimpression that the cloacal sense was original.    Any taboo designatum will, predictably, launch a euphemistic replacement-term -- indeed, an ever-obsolescing, self-abolishing series of same, since the stain of the referent is not thereby abolished.   Thus, words denoting ‘excrement’, ‘genitals’, ‘prostitute’ and (interestingly) ‘stupid’, form a never-ending series of neologisms  attempting to escape from what they mean.   Here, rather, we are confronted with a situation almost exactly opposite.  Rather than a word denoting something taboo, we have a completely innocent and uncontroversial expression (here, denoting a manual process of any kind, and later the fructification of agriculture), which, by historical accident, eventually became associated in particular  with a proscribed referent.    After the reference of the word manure became, in some contexts, identifiable merely with (horresco referens) poo-poo,  the word became unusable in contexts like Jefferson’s.   In much the same manner, the blameless designation of the male of the genus Gallus, namely the cock (saving your presence): so soon as this became a metaphor for the membrum virilis, it ceased to be salonfähig (at least in sensitive America) and was replaced by the improbable deverbal term   rooster. 

     Note that, in this last case, the sense of taboo was related purely to the word itself in its new application, rather than to anything specially concerning the he-hen (that proverbial rooftop alarm-clock), who is not  inherently  particularly phallic.   Other zoological comparisons suggest themselves at least as prominently:  the rhino comes prominently (upstandingly) to mind, a fact not lost upon the aphrodisiac-seeking Asians who are largely responsible for the slaughter of rhinos and elephants.

To see what’s going on,  consider the Engish word face.  It was borrowed from the French word of the same spelling, and continues to serve us unobtrusively in that capacity down to the present day.   And yet, as a term of human anatomy, it has quite dropped out of modern French, yielding to the neologism visage.  What is going on?   Is there something obscene about the human face?

Not at all.  What happened is, in French and not in English, the word face fell into bad company, specifically in the metaphor (much savored by the misnamed Enlightenment) la face du grand turc -- meaning, the buttocks.  That was enough to doom the innocent original.

In essence, this whole process isn’t even especially semantic, and tells you less about the linguistically skittish society that gave rise to it, than do such truly meaning-based evolutions  such as the words (in Europe and in America) for someone who is dumb as dirt.  Look up the etymology of cretin (from Christian-- and no, this was not a Dawkinsian-Hitchensian slur against the smarts of evangelicals, it was meant as a gentle euphemism), and the whole train of words whose origin was euphemistic (imbecile, idiot, moron, …) which yet can no longer even be used in polite society, in their original objective sense (though they survive as loose insults for bosses and bad drivers).   The process that affected French face or English manure  rather involves, neither euphemism nor dysphemism at its core, but something which we might dub infection:   a perfectly innocent word with an innocent meaning, by happenstance acquires a new association (perhaps in a single day, as when some wag coined the phrase about the big Turk’s bottom, which went viral), which dooms it.  In an extreme case, the infection may contain no semantic component whatsoever, but be strictly accidental and phonetic.   Thus, an old word for ‘stingy’, niggardly, which has no ethnic reference whatsoever, in contemporary jittery America has become taboo’d, owing to its merely phonetic resemblance to an unrelated word which I dare not even name.  (Lexical change in taboo-ridden tribal societies provide thousands of examples of such things.)   Or, to take an example  entirely removed from any semantic taint at any point:   reflexes of the Latin hodie ‘today’, which survives in Spanish hoy and Italian oggi, in phonetically slipshod French became so debased that it had to be replaced by a circumlocution, in which the original etymon survives almost imperceptibly:  (au jour d’)aujourd’hui.   Or again, the reflexes of Latin apis ‘bee’ became so worn-down and homophonous in the daughter languages, that the originally diminutive apiculus  had to plug the gap:   Spanish abeja, French abeille.

[** Footnote:  Example of concretum pro abstracto:  Originally, both bureau and toilette referred (in French) to a piece of cloth.  Their separate, contingent evolutions  then led to abstract senses, ‘bureaucratic organization’ and ‘mode of dressing for the day’, respectively.]

~

For a languages-in-contact look at twee euphemisms for “Number 1” in French and German (aller au pipi-room; die Pipi-Pause), try this:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/01/word-of-day-pipolade-bis.html

Stop me if you’ve heard this one!

Jevver hear the one about the Priest, the Rabbi, and the Mother-in-Law, walking into a bar?

-- If not, you never will, if the Féministes of France get their way:

http://madame.lefigaro.fr/societe/fin-blagues-sexistes-sur-twitter-t-elle-sonne-290114-685314

You can still make fun of priests (in fact, that same faction encourages you to), and still make fun of …. we-ll, maybe not rabbis: but imams, for sure [**].   But Mothers-in-Law will be off-limits, by order of the Speech Police.  

[** Footnote:  Actually, that only goes for the United States.  In Europe, the subject is by now completely taboo.]

Mysogyny is to be outlawed;  mysandry … Aber freilich;  be my guest.

[Mehr zum Thema:  La chasse aux hommes.]

No Comment

Recently (we shall not say when or where exactly) a certain individual was put under severe -- indeed crippling -- career sanctions, in Venue X,

not for anything he (or she) said or did in Venue X,

but for something (s)he opined elsewhere.

In light of all which -- We have no comment;  and shall have none, going forward.  About that, or about anything else.

And thus the list of taboos, for which the First Amendment is suspended, grows by one.

Note:  It is strictly forbidden even to reveal which items are on that list.

Note further:   That fact that anything at all is taboo, is itself taboo.

STRENG  -  VERBOTEN.

Similar taboos occur in Western Europe:  although there, the list is different.

Since it is impossible for anyone to learn directly  what is on each of those lists (each individual item must be inferred from occasional news stories containing surprisingly virulent denunciations of someone who transgressed such a taboo, such as may occur when an item is relatively new to the list;  but these will be lacking for long-term item, for which no-one has ever dared say anything for years and years), the foreign traveler is under peril of his livelihood, and even (in Europe, as regards [redacted]) his liberty (you can literally be imprisoned there for expressing certain purely historiographic opinions, even in the most detached fashion), should he/she/it ever (which G*d forbid) give utterance to what, unbeknownst to him/her/it/self, it is forbidden to speak.

The latest State Department advice to Americans traveling abroad is:  Never -  Say - Anything.

Best advice to foreigners considering travel to the U.S. :   Go somewhere else instead.

Additionally, the Justice Department has ruled that foreign taboos have jurisdiction in the U.S. as well, and that anyone who knowingly or unknowingly violates one of them  may be subject to penalties.  Best advice:  Nobody ever say anything to anyone about anything at all.   If anyone were to speak to you, pretend to be deaf    hearing-impaired    differently auditorializable.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-comfort-women-20131219,0,2503100.story

“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann,

darüber muß man schweigen.”

~

As for ourself, the roster of matters we dare even allude to, is shrinking.

The following topics are apparently still open to opinion;  and so, for the time being, we hereby renounce anything we have ever said about anything (in fact, we never did say anything, ever, about anything -- anything you might ever have read here, was posted by some mischief-maker who hacked into the system), and instead refer you to the following, still allowable topics -- although, as indicated, we have never actually said anything to anyone about these things, either, and are ready to renounce and denounce anything there stated should any item (say, hamsters) somehow fall under some new taboo:

=> bunnies  [not, obviously, of the Pl&yb*y variety]

=> hamsters [with no offense intended towards any other species of rodent or Creatures With Rodenticity who might feel left out]

=>  penguins  [This one is dicey, owing to the black/white angle; but for the nonce, the subject is apparently still permissible.  In future, however, we shall be careful to post nothing but photos of pink-and-blue penguins, or purple-and-orange penguins, and so on through all the wonderful colors of the all-powerful Rainbow.]

A totally typical penguin in its natural habitat

Really!  Honest Injun Native-American!  Lots of penguins look like this !!

[Update 11 - 11 - 2014:   Our stereotypical image above was in no manner of means intended to offend or demean or denigrate any spheniscids of an alternative coloration.  Read all about it here:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/389862/school-told-call-kids-purple-penguins-because-boys-and-girls-not-inclusive  ]

(We considered including elephants in this list, but finally concluded that these are too controversial, what with the ivory and all, and the Third World connections.  We shall endeavor to locate these posts and delete them as soon as time permits.)

Q:  What do you say to whites who might object that, to require celebration of “the Rainbow” and only the Rainbow, you are discriminating against whites, since white is not a color of the rainbow?

A:  Hahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahaahahahaha.

Tell those crackers they can shove it.

DISCLAIMER:  NOTHING OPINED ABOVE SHOULD BE TAKEN AS IMPLYING ANYTHING BUT THE DEEPEST REVERENCE FOR THE SEVERE ACTIONS TAKEN BY THE INQUISITORS OF VENUE X, AGAINST THAT DESPICABLE UNPERSON WHO SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS, HERE AND FOR ALL TIME THROUGHOUT HISTORY.

ALL HAIL THE WISDOM OF COMRADE STALIN !!!

 

  Big Sibling is watching you… and listening to you … and recording everything you say, or think, or dream

[Update 20 Dec 2013]  Our attorneys have advised us that our series of posts in praise of hamsters  could be regarded as discriminatory against the unfurry  furless   differently dermatologicalized.   Until the matter has been resolved in the courts, pending a decision as to whether any reference whatever to the creatures must be deleted,  posts will be permitted to remain  provided certain offensive language is replaced by something acceptable to the most thin-skinned  dermatologically minimized perennially aggrieved  understandably aggreviated pressure-group  grass-roots organization.

Approved samples:

Squee!  Hamsters are adorable. =>   Hamsters exist.

Hamsters are soo-oo-oo cute !  =>  Hamsters are not necessarily uncute.

I just lo-o-o-ove those little furballs! =>  We celebrate hamsters, equally along with such other fine species as warthogs, dung-beetles, gonococci, body lice, etc.

[Update 21 December 2013]  Legal counsel has reviewed the following post, and approved it for limited general consumption:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/10/bunny-break.html

Viewing of this material is restricted to those who are not offended by bunnies.

[Update 22 December 2013]

For a series of hard-hitting, hi-impact essays on the burning topics of our time,

yet written within the new guidelines of nooffensetoanyone,

try these on for size!

=> Straight talk from Dr J on foreign policy in the Sub-Sahara

=> Dr J talks to teens about love and marriage

=> A survey of Christianity and Islam

For further recently or unexpectedly taboo’d topics:

    Hour Wars (fusée horaire)

 

[Update 15 March 2014]  This morning’s Washington Post informs us of the following surprising fact:

Irish jokes still fair game

Politicians typically stay away from ethnic jokes, except if it’s Irish

The post goes on to illustrate with a video of politicians telling some.   That video won’t play on my machine, owing to various anti-malware protections;  and so to make up for it, we offer our own “edgy”, “taboo-testing”, but still (apparently) allowable joke:

An Irishman, a person of unrecorded nationality, and an individual from a nation we dare not name, walk into a bar  diner  organic restaurant

[For more on joke-taboos -- this time in France, try:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/01/stop-me-if-youve-heard-this-one.html ]

[Update 20 June 2014]  Weiteres zum Thema:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/06/20/george-will-to-c-span-on-sexual-assault-backlash-indignation-is-the-default-position-of-certain-people/?hpid=z2

[Update 10 Nov 2015]  Yet another reason, never to say anything about anything:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11986144/Teenager-bottled-by-ex-Countdown-champion-for-giving-his-book-bad-review.html

 [Update 19 Dec 2015]  Another topic that is highly charged, and festooned with taboos, in a certain country, but which can be rationally discussed here (except in certain Safe Spaces such as campuses):

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/19/world/asia/south-korea-comfort-women-park-yu-ha.html?_r=0

A well-balanced, un-nervous article.