One of my all-time favorite board games is Hasbro’s wildly popular Taboo. You may be familiar with it and its tremendously annoying purple buzzer, which the opposing team gets to gleefully press every time you utter one of the five forbidden words printed on each of the game’s many cards. The object of the game: get your teammates to guess the item on your card without using the five “Taboo” words (which Hasbro knows people are most likely to use when describing said item). Use “green” when describing “grass,” for instance, and you immediately get drowned out by the purple buzzer and docked a point or two, to the disappointment of your teammates and the laughter of your opponents. It’s a lot of fun, really.

Things get a little tougher, though, when we apply the same strategy to our real-life Taboos: things that are difficult to talk about because society deems them unsettling, controversial or potentially divisive. We have a lot of these at Stanford: race and affirmative action, multiculturalism, religious faith, political beliefs and sexual orientation prominent among them. And just like in the board game, there are a lot of words and concepts we can’t use, for various reasons, when talking about them.

A lot of the time, I think that’s a great thing. No one wants the N-word casually tossed about in a discussion about race, for example, or the loudest and most obnoxious voice to win in a discussion about politics.

But not infrequently, I think that like the tabooed items in the board game, tough discussions would be a lot easier to have if we let ourselves use our full vocabulary while having them.

We don’t generally do this, though, and for good reason: someone always gets really angry. As a columnist and writer, I get (and see other writers getting) the rhetorical equivalent of the purple-buzzer treatment all the time. It’s not an enjoyable experience. If you’ve ever written or spoken on a taboo subject (this one’s for you, Flipside staff), you’ll know what I’m talking about here: bitter ad hominem attacks against your personal character or writing style; overheated assertions that assail, rather than respectfully disagree with, your point; outraged rebuttals that, in true straw-man fashion, read far more into your original argument than you ever intended to put there.

In short, writers who tread on tabooed ground, at Stanford and elsewhere, tend to get hit with full-fledged barrages of the purple-buzzer treatment, drowning out potentially productive conversation with loud but unproductive noise. The ubiquity of such animus, however, belies its danger.

What is a writer to do when faced with the possibility of such animosity? We have several options, none of them good. We can delicately avoid writing about anything controversial, which has the upside of upsetting no one but the downside of resulting in blandly vapid columns about the oatmeal we ate for breakfast or the fun party we went to last night. We can write about controversial topics but do our best to agree with everyone, which also upsets nobody but tends to result in either meaningless self-contradiction or, if everyone really does agree, glorious and inspirational but ultimately forgettable preaching to a happily homogeneous choir. Either one dumbs down our discourse and has a chilling effect on the quality of intellectual life, itself predicated on a free and vibrant exchange of sometimes-conflicting ideas.

Or — and this is unquestionably the best option of a bad lot — we can say what we like without worrying unduly about the fury of the purple buzzer. Such writing, if articulated respectfully, can cause people to think critically rather than to passively accept the prevailing orthodoxy; to reexamine their own deeply held beliefs against the light of a real challenge; to contemplate the possibility that they may be wrong on a sensitive and important issue; or to reaffirm with conviction that they are in fact right. (Thanks for that one, Mill.)

So if I happen to get angry messages in my inbox strongly disagreeing with me, or nasty comments on the Daily website, I tend to think I’m doing at least one thing right: I’ve made people think hard about something important. (It can also just mean I’ve written a really awful article, though, so negative responses are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for proving intellectual quality.)

If we’re not careful, though, breaking the taboo can instead spark uproar, mutual bitterness and the ritual dance of self-flagellating apologies on the part of all involved, concluding in an unproductive retreat to the same ideological corners in which we began.

And so we remain stuck in a game we can’t get out of.

Miles loves Taboo, in small doses. Play a game or two with him at milesu1 “at” stanford “dot” edu.