Sexual vocabulary is understood instinctively across linguistic barriers.

Evidence

How intimately sex and language are intertwined can be seen by reading pornography in a foreign language. When de Sade is read in the original no dictionary is needed. The most recondite expressions for the indecent, knowledge of which no school, no parental home, no literary experience transmits, are understood instinctively, just as in childhood the most tangential utterances and observations concerning the sexual crystallize into a true representation. It is as if the imprisoned passions, called by their name in these expressions, burst through the ramparts of blind language as through those of their own repression, and forced their way irresistibly into the innermost cell of meaning, which resembles them. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 44

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• QUESTION: Is Adorno’s claim empirically testable — that ‘no dictionary is needed’ for de Sade in the original — or is it rhetorical exaggeration in service of his language-and-repression thesis? Worth pursuing the linguistics of taboo-word recognition.
• XREF: This aphorism theorizes the return of the repressed in language itself, dovetailing with Freud’s and later (Lacan, Kristeva) claims about the semiotic breaking through the symbolic order.