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> a kind of ancient taboo on certain words, like fire, that they are not spoken directly but instead connected with other, similar sources; it is like calling the toilet or jakes the bathroom

I find it amusing that we can reconstruct that PIE speakers had a verb for "to get high", but we can't reconstruct their noun for "bear", because it was taboo: speaking of the bear was like speaking of the devil, and so all we know are all the different ways the different languages chose to talk about the bear without saying its name.