I'm not making a distinction between silence as a pause and silence as keeping your mouth shut, because that distinction is irrelevant. In either case, nothing is communicated, because a pause is indistinguishable from a failed copy (something said that came through as signal noise).
You are advocating for the avoidance of specific words. That's a problem, because both the circumstances surrounding word choice and the signal itself have high entropy. You cannot reasonably expect the sound "bomb" to never be heard over a radio. It might be from a failure to obey the taboo, or it might be from a totally different and irrelevant signal that sounded to someone like "bomb". Signal and hearing simply don't work that way, and neither does society.
If you want to avoid miscommunication, the only feasible option is to accommodate the entropy of the communication system and the entropy of its participants.
I'm not making a distinction between silence as a pause and silence as keeping your mouth shut, because that distinction is irrelevant. In either case, nothing is communicated, because a pause is indistinguishable from a failed copy (something said that came through as signal noise).
You are advocating for the avoidance of specific words. That's a problem, because both the circumstances surrounding word choice and the signal itself have high entropy. You cannot reasonably expect the sound "bomb" to never be heard over a radio. It might be from a failure to obey the taboo, or it might be from a totally different and irrelevant signal that sounded to someone like "bomb". Signal and hearing simply don't work that way, and neither does society.
If you want to avoid miscommunication, the only feasible option is to accommodate the entropy of the communication system and the entropy of its participants.