If you want to know what a society truly worships, don’t look at its monuments or its mission statements. Look at its forbidden words. Every civilization in history has had verbal landmines that trigger disgust, fear, or punishment, and the content of those taboos is never random. Forbidden words always reveal what a culture considers sacred, and when those taboos shift, it means the civilization has rearranged its moral furniture. We’re living through one of those shifts right now, and the change is far deeper than most people realize.
The Ancient Purpose of Taboo Words
For most of human history, the gravest linguistic offenses revolved around the sacred. Blasphemy wasn’t just rude. It was dangerous. Words were treated as vessels of supernatural force, capable of desecrating holy things or calling down judgment from God. Across cultures you see the same pattern: ancient Israel treated irreverent speech about God as a capital crime. Medieval Europe considered oaths sworn in Christ’s name binding to the point of sacrilege. Islamic societies, then and now, punish insults to the Prophet or Qur’an with extreme severity. Indigenous cultures even today maintain strict verbal boundaries around ancestors, spirits, and ritual practices.
Taboo words served a structural purpose. They reinforced the pillars of the sacred order: God, king, ancestors, covenant, family, and the binding force of oaths. Violating an oath wasn’t dishonesty; it was treachery against the cosmic fabric. Desecrating a holy name wasn’t impolite; it was destabilizing and dangerous. Taboo language, in other words, protected the metaphysical foundations that held societies together.
How the West’s Taboo Center Drifted: Sacred to Hygiene to Identity
As religious authority weakened, the taboo center drifted. The West moved from sacred purity to hygiene purity, a worldview based on bodily cleanliness, public decency, and the belief that sexual and excretory words were polluting. Victorian propriety, Comstock laws, and social purity movements all fused sex, cleanliness, and morality. Language about sex or bodily waste became the new blasphemy.
This is the world George Carlin walked into in 1972 with his famous bit, “Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on Television.” This is, of course, extraordinarily NSFW, but it's also really funny.
The list wasn’t a personal ranking of offensiveness. It came straight from FCC obscenity standards, the last stronghold of hygiene-era morality. The FCC was terrified of bodily filth and sexual explicitness; they believed these words polluted the public sphere and eroded the social order. Carlin wasn’t mocking random prudishness; he was mocking a moral system obsessed with physical and sexual cleanliness.
Moreover, not one racial slur appeared on his list. That wasn’t because Carlin himself refused to say them. He used the N-word explicitly in other routines when analyzing racism and linguistic intent. The omission wasn’t personal morality; it was structural. Slurs were not part of the FCC’s regulatory framework. They weren’t considered “obscene.” They weren’t legally banned. In 1972, the cultural guardians of decency were still preoccupied with hygiene purity — sex, filth, indecency — not identity.
The N-word was ugly and obviously racist, but it was not yet the nuclear taboo it became in the late 20th and early 21st century. You can hear this in film, comedy, music, and regional speech of the time: socially discouraged, yes; socially annihilating, no. The fact that “t**s” was illegal to say on television while racial slurs were not tells you exactly where the moral voltage lived and how completely it has shifted since.
Today, half of Carlin’s list shows up on Netflix teen programming without anyone blinking. Sexual obscenity no longer carries the moral weight it once did. Bodily terms are treated as crude but harmless. Blasphemy barely registers. The hygiene era is dying, and into that vacuum has moved something entirely new: identity purity.
The Modern Blasphemy Code: What Gets You Destroyed Today
The easiest way to identify a culture’s sacred center is to ask which words destroy people instantly. Not hypothetically, but in practice. What language ends careers on contact? It’s not profanity. It’s not explicit sexual language. It’s not taking God’s name in vain. You can insult the nation, the military, the Founders, or the faith traditions of millions and be rewarded with a book deal.
But say a single racial slur or a slur targeting a protected gender or sexual identity, even once, years ago, in a quote, or in a private message, and your life detonates. Job gone. Platform gone. Reputation gone. Remorse doesn’t matter. Context doesn’t matter. Intent doesn’t matter.
These are treated not as insults, but as acts of blasphemy against the moral framework that undergirds our institutions. Identity is the new sacred, and slurs against protected identities function as violations of the holy.
How Other Cultures’ Taboos Compare
This modern American taboo regime isn’t a universal human instinct. Other cultures reveal how specific it is. Quebec French treats sacrilege — tabernacle, chalice, host — as its most explosive profanity. Italian and Spanish profanity historically revolves around sacred oaths and violations of holy objects. In Cantonese, the most powerful insults attack lineage and ancestry, violating family honor, not identity categories. Islamic cultures maintain blasphemy laws with real teeth: insults to the Prophet or the Qur’an carry catastrophic consequences. Northern European languages still draw their strongest curses from the demonic and mythic.
Every society protects what it considers holy. God, family, ancestors, lineage, nation, ritual: the sacred center shifts, but the mechanism stays the same. Only in modern Anglophone culture, especially the United States, do we find a moral order where insulting God is trivial, but insulting a protected identity is treated like spiritual contamination.
What Our New Taboos Protect
Taboos always protect the sacred. The question is simply: what is the sacred now? We used to protect the transcendent order: God, oaths, ancestors, the family line. Then we protected public decency and bodily purity. Now we protect identity categories and victimhood status.
This is not fundamentally about kindness or compassion. It’s about institutional power. Modern taboo language reinforces a moral hierarchy built around fragility rather than strength, grievance rather than virtue, and bureaucratic classification rather than covenant or character. Slurs are treated as sacrilege because they threaten the ideological scaffolding that defines legitimacy for the modern ruling class.
The Diagnosis
You don’t have to like slurs — most decent people don’t — to acknowledge the scale of the shift. We now live in a society where mocking God is fine, sexual obscenity is fine, dishonoring oaths is fine, desecrating tradition is fine, and insulting the nation is fashionable, but a single forbidden identity word can end a career or destroy a life overnight. Even if it was said fifteen years ago. Even if it was deleted immediately after the post or tweet or message.
We didn’t abolish blasphemy laws. We just rewrote them.
The forbidden words of a society reveal its true religion — and ours has quietly but decisively enshrined identity as its highest sacred object.
Editor’s Note: Here at PJ Media, we love talking about the culture, especially when we're talking about things the mainstream outlets won't touch. That can be harder than you think, getting us demonetized and delisted, yet we persist.
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