Introduction: Beyond Bad Words

Exclusionary intimacies: Racialized language in Veneto, Northern Italy

“…While codeswitching takes many forms and involves different units, such as inter-sentential versus intra-sentential, in this article, I study certain social and pragmatic functions of codeswitching. Generally speaking, it is usual for codeswitching to be used as a strategy of "containment" for jokes and offensive remarks, not only because the target code, Venetan, may be relatively unintelligible to some Italian overhearers, but also because the shift can iconically model that very inaccessibility, thus framing the event as unintelligible, tabooed (Fleming and Lempert, 2011), as something that should be avoided or concealed. Although unintelligibility can vary (Perrino, 2007;Wirtz, 2007), given the different degrees of knowledge of Venetan among speakers in the targeted audience, the very fact of trying to conceal problematic remarks frames these remarks as inaccessible to all but insiders.…”

Reflections on a Shared Name: Taboo and Destiny in Mayong (Assam)

“…At the foundation of anthropology as a comparative social science-a science that non-anthropologists were actually interested in-name avoidance practices were a rich source of theoretical insight and debate (Benveniste 1971, Frazer 1996, Freud 1918, Haddon 1935, Wittgenstein 1993. It is only recently that name taboos have reappeared in the literature as phenomena of theoretical concern, prompting useful insights into the (meta)pragmatic efficacy of speech avoidance in general (Fleming 2011, Fleming & Lempert 2011, Lempert & Silverstein 2013, Stasch 2011. Among other things, this literature demonstrates that, as a token of the verbal taboo type, name avoidance taboos are curiously inflexible.…”

Allusive References and Other‐Oriented Stance in an Affinal Avoidance Register

“… See Fleming and Lempert () and articles in the same issue for more on this paradoxical aspect of avoidance. …”