“Shhhhh”: when the religious label “ebrea / Jew” is treated as taboo in everyday language

This study highlights: the emergence in every-day interaction of a religious appellative as a taboo; the co-construction of unmentionable topics; how participants’ verbal and embodied resources are mobilised to make relevant that something should be treated as a “shushable”. Looking at the turn-by-turn unfolding of an episode during an Italian dinner (3 hours of video-recording, 5 participants) where a participant is called ebrea/‘Jew’, we ask: at which point does the shushable emerge? When do participants achieve shared understanding that an appellative is unmentionable? Which re-sources do participants mobilise to achieve understanding? Deploying Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics, we show how the meaning-making and action ascription processes behind the treatment of a topic as taboo are not solely attributable to words’ lexico-semantic meanings, but to the possibility for participants to draw inferences based on co-participants’ multimodal conduct, sequentially, epistemic territories and participation framework. The participant named ‘Jew’ reacts to the appellative by pointing at the camera and shushing her co-participants. This moment shows the social relevance of taboos, as it breaches through the local micro-episode into the socio-cultural macro-environment in which the interaction occurs. Furthermore, it illustrates a sense of taboo re-lated to a sense of being observed, situated in interaction.