What does it signify that a language has a word for a particular concept? That question has been addressed in very different ways by linguists and psychologists, who are interested chiefly in the consequences for individual cognition, and by historians interested in the social implications of shifts in vocabulary. In this talk I'll look at the development of some areas of the English vocabulary, and in particular the recent emergence of a set of descriptive terms metaphorically derived from vulgarities. I'll argue that there are features of these concepts which crucially depend on their mode of expression -- that is, which couldn't arise independently from culture or nonlinguistic experience.