At a book signing in London a few years back, I met a woman who’d just gone on a date with a man she had met online. “He mentioned over dinner that he had a fear of the C-word,” she told me, “and before I had time to think, I leaned across the table and said, ‘Cunt?’”

What he’d meant was commitment, but you can’t really blame the woman.

Everyone’s got their forbidden word now, something so loaded and hurtful only the first letter of it can be revealed. And because of that, because there are so many, it’s getting progressively harder to figure out what these letters stand for, an exception being the N-word, the original initial word. Others, though, aren’t so easy, especially when they’re written rather than spoken.

Take the B-word. The first time I read it, I went through the alphabet in my head, thinking Bisexual? Blind? Brexit? Bitch, I was told, is what it stands for.

This is what’s called “gendered language”, and should be replaced with the same word you’d use for a man: asshole, as in, “That Kellyanne person I saw on TV is a real asshole.” In front of children you might say “A-hole”, but that doesn’t make this the A-word: that’s a television show about autism.

The abovementioned C-word can be used for a vagina, cancer, someone of Chinese origin, or, new to me and, apparently, that woman in London, commitment. Fail at it, and you might be in for what many fundamentalist websites refer to as the D-word: divorce. Fundamentalists have also laid claim to the E-word: evolution.

The G-word is gypsy. Gay people have the F-word – faggot – and are now toying with the H-word. This stands for homosexual, which was perfectly acceptable a few years ago, but is now considered a slur, just as “gay” will eventually be, now that we’ve rebranded and are presently queer, which used to be the Q-word but was reclaimed. Perhaps we can donate it to the Quakers, a handful of whom might have been referred to at one time or other as “Quakes” and are still not over it.

So many of the words people object to are just shortened versions of the original. It’s fine to say that someone is Japanese, but lop off the last two syllables and it becomes hurtful – the J-word. Ditto Pakistani. Trans is an acceptable abbreviation of transgender, but jazz it up with an added Y and it becomes the T-word.

The first time I went to Sydney I was struck by the way Australians abbreviate things. It was January, “Jan”, they called it. That’s summer there, and at an outdoor market I saw a sign reading “fresh strawbs”. It made the word so ugly. What do people do with the time they saved by not saying “erries?”, I wondered.

Most rebrandings go in the opposite direction and become longer rather than shorter. One-syllable black sprouted into seven-syllable African American. Homeless person is now a “person experiencing homelessness”. Handicapped – another H-word – doubled its length with physically disabled. The R-word changes so frequently I honestly don’t know what it is now, though I bet it’s a real mouthful for those who used to be called the R-word. I recently spoke to someone who works for a non-profit, and was advised to no longer say two-syllable “felon” or “convict”. The new term is “justice-involved individual”.

When a woman told a sex columnist a relationship was going swimmingly until the man used the L-word, I thought, lesbian?

I’ve seen the I-word used to mean “immigrant” and, by our president, who seems to hate them, “impeachment”. The K-word is taken, used as it was by the KKK against Jewish people. I first heard the L-word on a podcast hosted by a sex columnist. A polyamorous woman phoned to say she’d been seeing a man outside her marriage. “I established boundaries right from the start,” she said. “This was to be about sex, with no emotional attachment.” The relationship had been going on for months, swimmingly, until he used the L-word. I was listening to the podcast in the bathtub, and thought, lesbian? That’s still OK, isn’t it?

“Love,” the woman said, bitterly. “He told me he loved me.”

The host was sympathetic. “That piece of shit!”

“Honestly?” I said to my bath water. “Love is the L-word?” I thought of the man she’d been sleeping with outside her marriage, the one being vilified, and couldn’t help but feel bad for him. The woman wanted it to be all about her C-word, while he was thinking commitment.

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