In 1988, a German journalist for the left-wing paper Die Tageszeitung (a.k.a. Taz) described a busy discotheque as “gaskammervoll,” meaning that it was as packed as a gas chamber (literally, “gas-chamberful”). Another journalist immediately wrote in protest to his editor. Next, a Taz colleague came to the original writer’s defense, calling the whole conversation “Endlösung der Dudenfrage”—“the final solution of the dictionary question.” This was a second pun: Duden means dictionary, but it rhymes with Juden, playing off the Nazis’ plan for exterminating the Jews, “Endlösung der Judenfrage” (“The Final Solution”). The German press was scandalized by this use of verboten vocabulary, and as a consequence the original Taz writer and two of the paper’s editors were sacked.

In Germany, the prohibition on Holocaust jokes is policed by law and informally maintained by social taboo—both the wages of the Third Reich’s sins. Those controls can sound draconian and provocative to the American ear, trained to despise the “thought police” and to revere the freedom of expression. But this minor episode from the world of 1980s German media might have new relevance in America today, where taboos both rhetorical and actual are falling as fast as Donald Trump can invoke them.

Murder, rape, concentration camps, child abuse—all these taboos have lost some of their peremptory power in the past month alone. The president was publicly and credibly accused of rape last week, and yet he easily dismissed his accuser as a liar. Also last week, Trump dismissed the murder of Jamal Khashoggi as essentially less important than Saudi Arabia’s money (“If they don’t do business with us, you know what they do? They’ll do business with the Russians or with the Chinese.”). On June 18, Liz Cheney defined a “concentration camp” as a place that can only exist in German history, even though Latin American migrants are being held in American concentration camps at this very moment. And on that same day, a Department of Justice staffer named Sarah Fabian proposed continuing state-sanctioned child abuse by pretending that the words “safe and sanitary” do not specify the provision of soap and toothbrushes to migrant children, many of whom have been separated from their parents by Trump’s goons.

Saying, “This is rape!” or “That is a concentration camp!” or “The government is abusing innocent children!” is not having the desired effect, because the president and his allies are leeching the powerful stigma attached to these crimes. The loss of taboo shows us its value, and how prohibitions are a crucial part of the social contract we live by. In the absence of law or when the law is used to commit moral outrages, the taboo is enforced by society and policed by language, which is why, for example, Republicans hysterically deny that U.S. government is shuttling desperate migrants into “concentration camps,” but, rather, into something else, something nameless.

The question, then, is where the new boundaries will settle. Once the sea has washed it away, how do you know where to redraw a line in the sand?