Taboo Has (Not) Gone with the Wind. Sexual Metaphors Relating to Cooking and Food

Abstract

Our conceptual system is, to a great extent, metaphorical and bears a great creative power. Metaphorical concepts in day-to-day language hold multiple meanings, for example, those referring to sexual relationships. This work aims to explore some of them, tracing the source domains of metaphorical creation, which are, among others, names of fruit and vegetables, meat, fish, pastries. We selected a few cases of re-adaptation of concepts related to gastronomy, used by Spanish native speakers, to describe sexual relationships. We examined the way in which these experiences are conceptualized and how speakers refer indirectly to genital organs or other concepts linked to sexuality. We  discussed the way  the perception of a reality, deemed as intimate and shameful, is mirrored in metaphorical expressions whose source concept is food-related. We  also stressed the importance of linguistic taboo as a possible limitation for Spanish native speakers. The corpus used in this work is mainly based on dictionaries, both of Americanisms and slang expressions, as well as on samples of colloquial language, extracted from actual conversations among Spanish native speakers.