tabu
taboo
English from Tongan
“Captain Cook brought back another word from the Pacific: the things you must never do.”
In Tongan, tabu (or tapu) meant "sacred" and "forbidden" simultaneously—a concept that European languages split into separate words. Something tabu was too holy to touch, too powerful to approach carelessly.
Captain Cook encountered the word in Tonga in 1777. He noted in his journal: "Not one of them would sit down, or eat a bit of any thing... On expressing my surprise at this, they were all taboo, as they said."
The word filled a gap in English. Before taboo, English had "forbidden" (by law) and "sacred" (by religion), but no word for things forbidden by social consensus—by an unwritten, unspoken collective agreement.
Sigmund Freud's 1913 work Totem and Taboo cemented the psychological meaning: taboo as repressed desire, forbidden thoughts. The Polynesian concept became a Viennese diagnosis.
Related Words
Today
Taboo has become one of English's most useful words: it describes exactly the territory between law and custom, between official rules and unofficial ones.
Every culture has taboos, but calling them that—naming the unnamed—is itself almost taboo. The word works by pointing at things we've agreed not to point at.
The Polynesian concept of sacred-and-forbidden-at-once still operates in modern taboo. The forbidden is always also fascinating.
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