(n.) A total prohibition of intercourse with, use of, or approach to, a given person or thing under pain of death, -- an interdict of religious origin and authority, formerly common in the islands of Polynesia; interdiction.
(v. t.) To put under taboo; to forbid, or to forbid the use of; to interdict approach to, or use of; as, to taboo the ground set apart as a sanctuary for criminals.
Example Sentences:
(1) Further, the use of food as a reinforcer has been considered taboo by those who use more conventional and restrictive management approaches with Prader-Willi syndrome individuals.
(2) I think we’re finally at a place in culture where a character being gay or lesbian isn’t taboo, especially for teenagers – the target audience for a lot of these summer blockbusters,” says screenwriter Graham Moore, who won an Oscar for the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game .
(3) Prolonged breast feeding should be encouraged, child health improved, and research conducted on the traditions, norms, customs, and taboos of target populations.
(4) Since his arrest, a French taboo has been broken and Strauss-Kahn's behaviour towards women, deemed "libertine" by his friends, has been raked over.
(5) It's actually very taboo to stop and say, "OK, I'm in a band and I'm really successful and my boyfriend's a pop star and he's really handsome and lots of girls fancy him, but I don't want to be with him."
(6) In explaining why its Oscar chances had all but disappeared, the Atlantic's Richard Lawson explained last month that as a result of the controversy, the film has "just become something vaguely taboo".
(7) In some ways, Sarkozy broke taboos, on what constitutes a modern family for example.
(8) "Whilst paying for NHS services is a difficult, and for many a taboo subject to debate, we really do have to think about how we move things forward."
(9) In the course of showing us the "dark" side of Scandinavian life, Michael Booth writes that Finland is "burdened by taboos" about the civil war, second world war and cold war ( The dark heart of Scandinavia , 28 January).
(10) This article proposes that a propensity for sexual selection originates in the gene system, and what becomes taboo is acquired through the learning that accompanies the experiences of the individual and culture when sexual selection occurs.
(11) The very possibility of a country leaving the single currency was so taboo as to be unmentionable as recently as a month ago.
(12) Because I feel it’s fair to say that comedy has been a thing, over and over again, that deals with a lot of taboo stuff.
(13) This cross-sex aversion may be a reflection of the incest taboo.
(14) In the thrall of social media and smartphones, we are drip-fed a steady supply of Instagram-filtered intimacy – and in this world, negative emotions and loneliness are taboo.
(15) It seemed as if there were few taboos left, but later this month cable network Showtime begins airing a show that marks another step forward.
(16) Restrictions on local news agencies and newspapers seem to have eased recently with a few going as far as breaking the taboo on reporting the plight of political prisoners or the house arrests of opposition leaders.
(17) The special epidemiology of the disease, the long incubation period, prejudice, and taboo concerning sexuality have constrained constructive and open debate on strategies and approaches.
(18) Traditional black customs, in contrast, place strong taboos on the male's involvement in birth.
(19) Yet the debate avoided a taboo at the heart of the story: the tricky matter of class.
(20) This information model, based on cancer taboo, is largely preferred by these healthy people and is followed by doctors, patients and family members.
Unsayable
Definition:
Example Sentences:
(1) Privatisation would destroy that at a stroke.” Trevor Phillips says the unsayable about race and multiculturalism Read more The government is considering privatisation as one of a number of options for Channel 4, which is commercially run but owned by the state.
(2) And the oath of “believing in freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from abuse …” would arguably entail, from the prime minister, her cabinet, her party and her Ukip fellow travellers, a rather more rigorous rejection of Islamophobia, so that Muslim women in shopping centres didn’t have to be dragged along the ground by their hijabs in a newly emboldened climate of “saying the unsayable”.
(3) Comedy wants you to say the unsayable; the celebrity industry would rather you didn’t.
(4) Where it was possible at last for Egyptians to stand side by side and say what was previously unsayable.
(5) That No comes from deep within – and he can never unsay it.
(6) Lessing delivers the occasional blast of dry humour, but it is her intellectual honesty, her ability to say the unsayable, which has made her famous.
(7) "Germans would probably do themselves a service by leaving the euro, but this is something that is unsayable in German politics."
(8) Many of these are people with posh names, liberal-baiting sayers of the unsayable – the “unsayable” generally just being routine racism, sexism and idiocy.
(9) For a potential £400,000 he was prepared to say the unsayable.
(10) It can be an interesting exercise to think the otherwise unsayable.
(11) The unsayable always has that strange cliff-edge allure, and quite a few comedians forage their material in no-go areas.
(12) "I like working in an environment of creative confidence and respect – where nothing is unsayable, so long as you find the right way to say it."
(13) One council leader I met dared openly to say the unsayable – there was no initiative on benefit nor incentive to work that could break the cycle of welfare dependency because there was no local worthwhile work.
(14) Mindful of the damage his win-at-all-costs moves had wrought, Netanyahu lost no time trying to unsay what he had said.
(15) His unsayable thing about women is that they [we] all want to be ravished.
(16) There are things you can never unsay, that you cannot say and still remain friends, and that would have been one of them.
(17) Here was a writer who said the unsayable, thought the unthinkable, and fearlessly put it down there, in all its raw emotional and intellectual chaos.
(18) Joan provoked incredulity mixed with a weird kind of rapture, as she said the unsayable – and they doubled over in laughter again and again.
(19) As Ken Clarke did in 1990 when his colleagues ummed and ahed and allowed themselves to be browbeaten by Margaret Thatcher and her praetorian guard, so Purnell has said the previously unsayable - that the prime minister must go.
(20) I was cited everywhere as having said the unsayable: that it is possible for a woman to dislike her children, even to regret having brought them into the world.