Never, in a lifetime revolving around books, has your reviewer come across a dictionary of what you should and should not do throughout the whole gamut from social etiquette to downright illegality. Originally intended to be titled Taboos: A Dictionary to the Forbidden, this was thought unsatisfactory because “in our own society, that of the industrialized West, the word ‘taboo’ has lost almost all its magical and religious associations, it no longer has the idea essential to Margaret Mead’s definition as a prohibition whose infringement results in an automatic penalty without human or divine mediation”. This is due primarily, Thody argues, to it being used by British and American writers and journalists as a “loan” word, that is, a word which enables “distinctions to be made that had not previously been possible, and ideas to be expressed in a new and more concise manner”. A loss of much of the word’s original meaning thus ensues. He seizes the opportunity here to define and discuss the extended meaning of taboo as it has evolved to take in the ethics of sexuality, the role of the law, the limit to the authority of the state, and “the widespread and apparently irresistible ambition of human beings to tell their fellows what not to do, to eat, to say or to think”.
After a closely reasoned explanatory introduction covering the historical usage of the word “taboo”, and the progress toward a society without taboos, and including general topics such as “the difference between taboos and laws, the function of law in a democratic society, the role played by taboos in earlier societies, and the place they still occupy in our own”, Thody arranges his Dictionary in five sections:
- 1.
1Actions ‐ Don’t do it, be it, or indulge in it;
- 2.
2Nourishment ‐ Don’t eat it or drink it;
- 3.
3Words and themes ‐ Don’t say it and don’t talk about it;
- 4.
4Ideas, books and pictures ‐ Don’t think it, write about it, paint it, print it, or show it; and
- 5.
5Signs ‐ Don’t make yourself look like that.
Each section begins with a list of the terms or topics to be defined or discussed and ends with a long series of notes and references. In three sections, Actions; Words and themes; and to a lesser extent in Ideas, books and pictures, the words listed appear to validate the thesis that most taboos are directly connected with either sex or religion. And even in Signs there are sex‐linked concepts and objects, cross‐dressing (expressly forbidden in Deuteronomy), infibulation, legs, studs, trousers (or rather kilts), and veil. Only in Nourishment does sex seem to be absent but religion is well to the fore. Delicacy and polite manners on the part of a sexagenarian reviewer do not allow further prurient examples in a family journal. This, of course, Thody would rightly attribute to the don’t write about it and don’t print it syndrome.
A select list of themes and topics, a headwork index, a select list of names, and an extensive bibliography, support the text. It should be emphasised that the Dictionary is not a piece of “curious” literature of the sort advertised in the insalubrious columns of dubious weeklies, but a serious study of past and present taboos. But, somewhere in one of George Orwell’s early novels is a female librarian of the old school whose ambition it was to frustrate male readers she imagined were seeking out the “dirty” bits in various medical textbooks. She would be kept busy keeping an eye on those consulting this particular reference work!
