“Whored-out to the KGB”: Defining Obscenities in Georgian and Other Languages of the Caucasus

Perhaps the most famous 20th century statement on the definition of obscenity comes from none other than the Supreme Court of the United States. In the 1964 court case Jacobellis v. Ohio, court justice Potter Stewart famously wrote defending the release of a film that the State of Ohio wished to ban for obscenity: “I shall not today attempt further to define [obscenity]… and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it” (Stewart 1964). Such a statement from the highest court in the land reveals something ineffable about the idea of obscenity that even intellectuals and legal professionals have difficulty putting their finger on. Why is it that it is so hard to put into words the visceral feelings we sense when an obscenity is uttered? Why do different people in the same society come to different conclusions about what is obscene and what is permissible speech? Even more so, why does obscene language differ from one society to another? This paper will seek to provide some linguistic preconditions to such a debate. Following Ljung (2011), I will argue that obscene speech differs from nonobscene speech not in any categorical way, but rather belongs to an entire pragmatic class of emotive speech triggered by anthropological taboos, among which obscene speech constitutes only one part of a broad spectrum of behavior. But obscenities, by virtue of being speech, also bear formal properties of encoding distinct from other kinds of taboo-related cultural phenomena. I will further show that the properties that distinguish obscene from permissible speech in Western languages are also found in less familiar languages of the world, including the languages of the Caucasus, to which we will later turn.