Forbidden
marked off, and untouchable because of it
The word entered English through Cook’s Pacific voyages in the 1770s and is one of very few Polynesian loans in general use. Its sense is not prohibition in the ordinary legal way. Tapu marks a person, a place or an object as set apart — charged, restricted, under obligation — and the prohibition follows from the marking rather than producing it. Its opposite, noa, means ordinary, free, unrestricted. English took the prohibition and left the marking behind, so taboo now suggests an awkward subject rather than a status. The shape of that loss is the entry. And the concept is not exotic: an emblem that makes a hospital untouchable under the Geneva Conventions is tapu written as treaty law (→ Visual Grammar, VG·0010).
Sources · 4
- documented The word’s entry into English through the journals of Cook’s third voyage, 1770s.
- documented The tapu / noa opposition in Polynesian usage — marked and set apart against ordinary and unrestricted.
- documented Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. taboo, for the narrowing of the English sense.
- traditional The comparison with the Geneva emblems. The Institute’s own, offered because the structure matches, not because the traditions are related.