Word: verboten
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...surface, to be sure, the whole category hinted of deep male insecurity: along with the assertions of sophistication and self-confidence came heavy doses of instruction on how to look right and act cool. But actually talking about such anxieties, the mainstay of women's magazines, was all but verboten...
Even on radio, where the most common four-letter vulgarisms are verboten, a host of popular "shock jocks" consider giving offense is Job One. Their humor is guy talk, kid division. The victims of their gags are familiar from the schoolyard: racial and sexual minorities, scheming females, body parts and bodily functions. A few years back, a D.C. radio host was censured for observing, on Martin Luther King Day, that "killing four more" would get + Americans the rest of the week...
Such greasepaint and graven images are verboten in Wolfgang Hildesheimer's temple of the pure genius: "However much we search the reservoir of our imagination for an image whereby Mozart became real to us, we find it, strangely enough, only in the reports of his eccentricities. It is easier to visualize him making faces than walking in the door. I think only someone with no imagination can imagine him." One would like to read this as an equivalent to Mozart's A Musical Joke or dialogue from the theater of the absurd. In fact, the German-born author...
...Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev. Since West Berlin will receive natural gas under the terms of the agreement,the West Germans hope that Honecker's approval of the plan may augur well for future discussion of matters involving West Berlin-a subject that East Germany has often regarded as verboten...
Caveat. An Al-verb, a victim of the general's verification program, to which resistance is verboten for even the most insolent little noun. As in: "I'll have to caveat my response, Senator...