This volume examines the concept of taboos and tabooism and a dozen powerful ones in our society and suggests the control they exert on our everyday lives.

Many words and expressions are viewed as 'taboo', such as those used to describe sex, our bodies and their functions, and those used to insult other people. This 2006 book provides a fascinating insight into taboo language and its role in everyday life. It looks at the ways we use language to be polite or impolite, politically correct or offensive, depending on whether we are 'sweet-talking', 'straight-talking' or being deliberately rude. Using a range of colourful examples, it shows how we use language playfully and figuratively in order to swear, to insult, and also to be politically correct, and what our motivations are for doing so. It goes on to examine the differences between institutionalized censorship and the ways individuals censor their own language. Lively and revealing, Forbidden Words will fascinate anyone who is interested in how and why we use and avoid taboos in daily conversation.

In a changing society, Christians and Jews have looked to the Bible to find values and models. But the Hebrew Bible does not offer just a single model for family behavior or relationships. This volume explores the positive and negative aspects of family life in ancient Israel as portrayed in the Bible. Rashkow examines the relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, and siblings, looking at the variety of conflicts that emerged: incest, rape, abuse, murder, and hatred. Ultimately, Rashkow's analysis provides a reflection on family, which is given texture and depth through her use of psychoanalysis and literary theory. This text traces the influence of the biblical images on later Western literature and society and provides comparative discussions of other ancient Near Eastern literatures. Also useful as a textbook for courses in Hebrew Bible, feminist studies, and psychological interpretations of the Bible.

Nikki has spent countless nights fantasizing over one man, CIA agent and town hero Grant Rivers. Returning home from assignment for a brief visit, Grant takes her out for her nineteenth birthday - just the two of them - and she sees it as an opportunity. Ignoring the fact that her folks wouldn't approve of a romantic relationship between them she sets out to seduce the one man she's been forbidden to have, but has always wanted. Alpha male, military hero, CIA, hot and steamy romance, taboo, forbidden love, new adult, coming of age, older man younger woman, second chance, romance complete series, family relationships, alpha dominant male

America's often-unspoken morality codes make many topics taboo in "the land of the free." This book analyzes hundreds of popular culture examples to expose how the media both avoids and alludes to how we derive pleasure from our bodies. Flatulence ... male nudity ... abortion ... masturbation: these are just a few of the taboo topics in the United States. What do culturally enforced silences about certain subjects say about our society—and our latent fears? This work provides a broad yet detailed overview of popular culture's most avoided topics to explain why they remain off-limits and examines how they are presented in contemporary media—or, in many cases, delicately explored using euphemism and innuendo. The author offers fascinating, in-depth analysis of the meaning behind these portrayals of a variety of both mundane and provocative taboos, and identifies how new television programs, films, and advertising campaigns intentionally violate longstanding cultural taboos to gain an edge in the marketplace.

Gage didn't know his father. It was just him and his mum growing up. The last place he ever expected to meet the man who helped create him was in prison.When Gage kills his stepfather whilst trying to protect his mother, he meets Holden. His father. Together their relationship becomes something forbidden, taboo and illegal. The question is will their relationship survive the test of prison life? And will they have the chance to live in freedom?This is a very taboo M/M relationship. It has triggering subjects, such as domestic violence, rape and abuse. Do not read this if you are easily offended.

French realist texts are driven by representations of the body and depend on corporeality to generate narrative intrigue. But anxieties around bodily representation undermine realist claims of objectivity and transparency. Aspects of bodily reality which threaten les bonnes moeurs - gender confusion, sexual appetite, disability, torture, murder, child abuse and disease - rarely occupy the foreground and are instead spurned or only partially alluded to by writers and critics. This wide-ranging study uses the notion of the taboo as a powerful means of interpreting representations of the body. The hidden bodies of realist texts reveal their secrets in unexpected ways. Thompson reads texts by Sand, Rachilde, Maupassant, Hugo, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Mirbeau and Zola alongside modern theorists of the body to show how the figure of the taboo plots an alternative model of author-reader relations based on the struggle to speak the unspeakable. Dr Hannah Thompson is a Senior Lecturer in French at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her first book, Naturalism Redressed: Identity and Clothing in the Novels of Emile Zola, was published by Legenda in 2004.