taboo

Taboo is a Milton Bradley game which turns out to be way more fun than the description I'm about to give makes it out to sound.

It's best played with at least 6 people, divided into 2 teams. On each turn, one player from one team takes the hot seat. Let's say it's your turn. You've got a stack of cards, and the other team has an hourglass timer and an obnoxious buzzer.

Each card has a word at the top, which you must get your teammates to guess, and 5 taboo words below that you're not allowed to say. Your job is to get through as many cards as you can before time runs out. If you say a taboo word, you get buzzed and the other team gets the point.

Let's try an example: Your word is Zebra. You're not allowed to say any of the following words: Black, White, Horse, Animal, Stripe (or any forms of any of those words). You end up saying things like "it's kinda like a pony, but with alternating light and dark bands"

This game will keep you on your toes and on your way to becoming a human thesaurus, and will often just degenerate into profanity. As I once had it put to me: "Replace every noun with 'fucker' and every adjective with 'fucking' and you'll never strike out!"

taboo also tabu, and in Polynesia, tapu, (sacred and forbidden): prohibited [forbidden] by tradition or social usage or other authority. A taboo generates fear, shame, and guilt in those who disobey it, thus enabling those in authority to wield power over those under them. An activity, idea, or cognition which is taboo may not even be discussed.

Dictionary of Sexology Project: Main Index

Taboo is also the name of a men's magazine published by the same people who put out Hustler...and if you thought Hustler was gross, don't even glance at Taboo, which is devoted to extreme fetishes and hits a new low in gratuitous sickness. Most of the pictorials involve women being tied up, gagged, locked in a cage, tortured with hot wax and needles, or something similar. Worse yet, most of the women aren't all that nice-looking (I sort of suspect that these are desperate women who were too unattractive to get into less humiliating magazines). They also tend to have far too many tattoos and piercings. Basically, if bondage and leather and S&M are your sort of thing, then I guess you can give it a shot, but it's just not for me. I wish people wouldn't sell this magazine where the teenage boys can get at it.

• Pictorials: 6-8
• Girls: varying ages; many unattractive women; lots of tattoos and piercings
• Penetration: lots (dildo, fingers, penis, other weird stuff)
• Lesbian: 0-1/issue
• Guy/Girl: 1-2/issue
• Group: occasional
• Fetish: leather, watersports, heavy bondage, sadomasochism, enema, anything sick you can imagine and some stuff you can't
• Stories/Articles: I don't know, and I'm not picking up another issue to look.

know_no_bounds's rating: zero stars

Ta*boo" (?), 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. [Written also tabu.]

 

© Webster 1913

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Ta*boo", v. t. [imp. & p. p. Tabooed (?); p. pr. & vb. n. Tabooing.]

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. [Written also tabu.]

 

© Webster 1913

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Ta*boo" (?), a. [Written also tapu.] [Polynesian tabu, tapu, sacred, under restriction, a prohibition.]

Set apart or sacred by religious custom among certain races of Polynesia, New Zealand, etc., and forbidden to certain persons or uses; hence, prohibited under severe penalties; interdicted; as, food, places, words, customs, etc., may be taboo.

 

© Webster 1913