Ethics and morality

Nearly every word in this list came out of Latin or Greek. Le tabou did not, and English is the reason French has it at all. The word tapu was written down in the journals of James Cook’s third voyage, in Tonga, in seventeen seventy-seven; it entered English as « taboo », and travelled on from there into French, German and the rest of Europe. It is one of the handful of Polynesian words to make that journey. What travelled with it is what matters here. Tapu did not mean simply forbidden. It meant set apart, marked off, placed under a restriction that was sacred and legal at once, the two ideas being one idea. That is why a taboo is still not the same thing as a prohibition: a rule tells you what you may not do, and a taboo tells you what is not brought up in the first place. English then went a step further than French and made a verb of it, « to taboo a subject », while French stopped at a noun and an adjective that takes an agreement: un sujet tabou, des sujets tabous.