Too charged to touch

“Taboo” is a young word in English. It arrives in 1777, borrowed from tapu. In its original form it didn't mean shameful or dirty, it meant something closer to sacred: consecrated, set apart, too charged to be handled.

Somewhere between that meaning and ours, we lost the second half. “Too charged to touch” became simply “not to be touched,” and the sense that these were the places where a culture stored its real voltage dropped away.

But it isn't immoral

Notice what the original word did not mean: wrong. Charged is not the same as immoral, it wasn't then, and it isn't now. Yet somewhere along the way we started using “taboo” as a synonym for morally suspect, and that slip is where most of the mispricing begins.

The taboo label, as it functions today, attaches not to the harm a business does but to the discomfort it creates. That is a labelling error, and labelling errors are where value hides.