In particular, I find the final point incredibly interesting: black men use the N-word to mean "buddy" and that black culture is becoming much more mainstream. As such others would like to use the vocabulary of black culture without being black.
One would imagine that the increased use of the vocab of black culture would lead to decreased racism. But, if it cannot be used because of the current stigma of non-blacks using the N-word, perhaps this stigma actually increases racism instead of decreasing it.
I agree, it's an interesting point. "Black" culture isn't nearly as uniform as some people would like to believe. As a mixed African-American raised around multiple different ethnicities, my brother and I have had many heated debates about the usage of the word. Even within our own community. In the end, it really doesn't matter much to either of us. It's just interesting.
For us, there is no stigma attached to non-blacks using the word. The problem is intent. Like any word, it can be used negatively or positively, and I prefer not to have to second guess whether you meant it one way or another. So I kindly ask people, that I don't know well, to refrain from using it around me.
One night I was having dinner with my ex-girlfriend, who was full-blooded Italian, and her family. Her mother absolutely loved me. Somehow we got around to the topic of how much better I was than her ex-boyfriend, and her mom blurted out, "He was such a n-er." When she realized what she said, she looked at me and said, "But you're not a n-er. You know...there's just certain people that are." I never directly responded, and I wasn't sure how I felt about it at the time. But it opened my eyes to the complexity of even attempting to define what the word means to different groups of people.
> "Black" culture isn't nearly as uniform as some people would like to believe.
I spent a few months in the US a few years ago, and one of the things that bothered me was that in the media, "black culture" and "gangsta culture" were synonymous - nothing to suggest that a black person might be an engineer or a manager or a wise elder or whatever. Whether it was talking heads on TV or a comedy set in a park, someone riffing on "black culture" would be doing gangsta stereotypes. The only time it seemed that blacks were allowed to be something other than "gangsta" in public discourse were if the conversation was specifically about race.
> nothing to suggest that a black person might be an engineer or a manager or a wise elder or whatever. Whether it was talking heads on TV or a comedy set in a park, someone riffing on "black culture" would be doing gangsta stereotypes.
In Hollywood movies perhaps, but not in day-to-day media. Probably not the best example, agreed - I just lobbed it in there as an aspiration that wasn't a job :)
The use internal to african american culture aside, My dad, not known for his political correctness said to me when I was a little kid "n-er's come in all colors."
I use the more politically correct version "white trash comes in all colors."
I don't consider it so, not as a white person. IMO however, being white trash is not about poverty, its about ignorance and a lack of a desire to know more about the world.
This is like someone saying "I am a man, and I don't find it offensive if they call some men faggots". That's just because while you're a man, you're not a homosexual man, so it doesn't affect you.
It's not to whites in general that the term "white trash" will be offensive. It's to the subset of whites that are labelled as such.
>IMO however, being white trash is not about poverty, its about ignorance and a lack of a desire to know more about the world.
Just like how blacks were considered "ignorant and lazy".
Wikipedia puts it like this:
>White trash is a derogatory American English racial slur referring to poor white people, especially in the rural South of the United States, suggesting lower social class and degraded standards of living.
Besides, being poor and working hand to mouth, or coming from a dysfunctional poor family, lessens your "desire to know more about the world" and your sophistication....
I prefer not to have to second guess whether you meant it one way or another.
Yes. Communication is hard enough as it is, without having to second guess more things.
But it opened my eyes to the complexity of even attempting to define what the word means to different groups of people.
I don't know in italian, but in spanish we don't have a word for n-er, we just have a word for the color black.
That word (negro) is syntactically similar to n-er in english, which produces lots of misunderstandings with english speakers. So again, communication is really hard.
If I'm not mistaken, it's not "similar". It's literally the same word, just like the English "hound" and the German "hund". Meanings sometimes split, but the origin is the same.
It shares the same root, but it isn't the same word. "Negro" in spanish means the color black. It might or might not be used to refer to race, just like "black" might or might not be used to refer to race. To clarify, "black" usually translates as "negro". Meanwhile, "n-er" usually translates as "negro" followed by an offensive adjective.
I guess it apparently depends on what definition of the word "word" (which is quite overloaded) one uses, though. I'm not quite familiar with English linguistic terminology but I believe it's more about sharing a radix than a root.
That line of reasoning the mother used isn't uncommon. I can date it back to at least '96 and know that line of reasoning existed well before then. [0]
I imagine that once the majority of "non-black" use of the "n-word" is no longer primarily racist, the stigma against "non-blacks" using the word will quickly diminish.
Of course, the stigma existing keeps the non-racist use of the word limited, which is ultimately counter-productive (at least for this purpose). Catch-22.
> I imagine that once the majority of "non-black" use of the "n-word" is no longer primarily racist, the stigma against "non-blacks" using the word will quickly diminish.
I imagine that happened sometime in the 90s, with the rise of mainstream rap. The stigma didn't seem to diminish.
I very much doubt the word's usage by "mainstream rap" begins even to breach the noise floor in its overall use, let alone takes it across the "primarily racist" threshold.
Problem is many view the entire popularity of black culture as a double edged sword. Black culture is becoming popular but not the people associated with the culture or more to the point. America wants the culture but not the black.
Racism will always be an issue for the simple fact, we've rarely addressed it as a country but instead choose to ignore it thinking it'll go away (the amount that is uttered by people baffles me as if ignoring a problem makes it go away. Absolute madness).
My girlfriend is puerto rican and grew up in harlem and the bronx. she and all her family and friends drop the n-bomb in reference to each other. That includes to and from her black friends.
I'm white I don't say it and it made me uncomfortable at first (now I couldn't care less).
These days, I'd bet a very high percentage of n-bombs dropped by white people occur when quoting black comedians, or music. The Chapelle Show alone may well account for a double-digit percentage of it. :-)
Oh, and movies where it's played for laughs. Blazing Saddles, Django Unchained.
> Oh, and movies where it's played for laughs. Blazing Saddles, Django Unchained.
You almost never see this happen in mainstream culture (in fact, the Chappelle show is one of the only notable examples of this and this is precisely one of the main reasons it was considered so edgy and controversial). The two examples you described are 1) from 40 years ago, when culture was a lot more comfortable with usage of the word, and 2) a period piece about American slavery. Usage in the latter movie has nothing to do with the fact that it's "played for laughs", since you could see the same thing in 12 Years A Slave (which came out less than a year later and was very much not a comedy).
If white people want to use that word in that (or, basically, any) context, maybe they should start working towards systematically dismantling the apparatus of racism in this country and then check back in twenty years.
Not really. It's irrational, but it's also meaningful that non-blacks aren't 'allowed' to say that word. It's a reminder that things aren't equal, things aren't fair, and the way this currently affects you is mildly unfair, but also entirely symbolic.
For more on this topic, I recommend Steven Pinker's 2007 talk at Google. In the second part of it, Pinker tries to answer the question, "Why do people get so upset over certain words?"[1] He falsifies some popular hypotheses and finds interesting commonalities across languages. Obviously, the video contains lots of swearing.
Just a reminder about history, Richard Pryor, whose comedy albums include 'That Nigger's Crazy' (1974), and "Bicentennial Nigger" (1976) then, and I quote now from his Wikipedia entry:
> In 1979, at the height of his success, Pryor visited Africa. Upon returning to the United States, Pryor swore he would never use the word "nigger" in his stand-up comedy routine again.[36] However, his favorite epithet, "motherfucker", remains a term of endearment on his official website.
There's a lovely composite of Pryor's views vs. Carlin's at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZCS5I80X-8 , which is the [36] above. I empathize much more with Pryor in that sequence than Carlin.
'But do note that I have to euphemize the N-word here in print just as someone would have once have felt compelled to say, “By Jove!”'
But why? They're just words - a set of phonemes as @jasode points out. The meaning is only inferred from the context in which the word is used - this is made clear from the last few paragraphs about the use of the word nigger to mean buddy.
My first (unconscious) response on reading 'N-word' or similar is to translate that euphemism to the word itself, so nothing is spared in the mind of the reader by "censoring".
Instead it seems the author is trying to expunge himself of having used profanity, when in fact discussing a word in this context is surely not profane?
You may be underestimating how powerful a hold that word has on the American subconscious. Heck, I even get a little queasy when I read Angular code with ng-this and ng-that. Of course I know "ng" just stands for Angular, but I still do a double-take, at least a minor one.
Regarding the use of the word among black men to mean "buddy", sure, my older Italian relatives used to call each other "wop" as a in-group term of affection. But woe to any non-Italians who called them that!
> But woe to any non-Italians who called them that!
I wouldn't question that - the point was that a discussion of the words themselves in a clinical sense carries no pejorative meaning (and even their intended meaning can vary according to context).
It's unfortunate for the purpose of this discussion that the author chose "N-word" as his example. It would have simplified matters if he had chosen "F-word" or "C-word" given that all modern profanity in the linked article has been reduced to euphemism, as my question wasn't about racial labelling per se, but rather about the need to reduce any (modern) profanity to 'X'-word when discussing the words themselves, as distinct from using them for their implicit meaning.
One would absolutely refrain from using racial labels in a pejorative context. However in a discussion of the meaning or history of the words themselves (racially linked or not), their use is unambiguously not profane. One only has to consult an authoritative dictionary to confirm that these words do in fact exist, and can be used in an uncensored form without causing offence.
Who decides what a word means and when? Has a dictionary ever defined the complex web of emotions tied to that or any other hateful slur? Can the OED tell you what it feels like for a person of color to hear it, even in supposedly clinical circumstances?
Woe betide anyone who believes assault is a proper response to words. If there is only a vocal response, the woe comes only in invisible amounts, even from old Italians.
This pretty well sums up my feelings on how children's movies approach profanity. Or in the article, how the musical avoided using the word "belly."
The curse word itself is only offensive because of the meaning, or what it implies. The proof of this: say the word to someone who does not know it (for example, someone who does not speak the language); they won't be offended.
So, when a kids movie says "What the freak!?" or "What the fudge!?" the meaning is the same as "What the fuck!?" Or when a loud noise drowns out the speaker, we know what was said. So, then, why is this okay? Because we didn't hear the sounds? If I carry an airhorn around with me, go up to people and say to them, "You're a fa<HOOOONNNNKKKKK>!" they will be upset (and not just by the loud noise).
I've felt before that I'm just not offended by profanity. But after reading this article, I've had to really reconsider that view. I'm not okay with using "the N-word." When people say it, I cringe. I don't even want to type it, because it is offensive. But when I say "the N-word," I know what word I mean. You know what word I mean. You're probably not offended though, because we're just talking about the word. Using the word "nigger" in a conversation about the evolution of profanity should not offend anyone.
The article talks about how many of the words we consider offensive today are used to slur groups of people. This is why it's not offensive for black people to use the word in place of "buddy." It's not a slur, it is an endearment. From this, I conclude that using any word as a slur is offensive. To slur is to "make damaging or insulting insinuations or allegations about." That action is offensive. It's not the sounds that are offensive.
In closing, I would just like to say that you're all a bunch of <HOOOONNNKKKKKKK>!
Instead of a history of evolving swear words (which implies a changing society), it's much more interesting to me that there's possibly a neurological or cognitive basis for swear words (which implies a stable source that's built into our DNA.)
When I was a kid and filtered the world as facts in black & white, it was baffling why certain words were "bad". Why is c_nt so bad? That doesn't make sense -- It's just a word! If you were to let a foreigner who didn't understand English listen to 100 random words with c_nt being one of them, he/she would not be able to identify which word was the nasty one. Listening to the phoneme is not enough. With that mindset, I laughed along with the George Carlin "7 Dirty Words" routine[1].
Later in life, I ran across across a thread discussing profanity and I saw an interesting sentence that finally made it click. Basically it said, "if c_nt wasn't the taboo word, it would be another word that was equally taboo."
In other words, we seem to always create this "space" in language reserved for taboo. It's not related to specific phonemes. If one says that humans have built in brain wiring for "grammar" (Chomsky[2]) to understand nouns, verbs, and recursive clauses... one might extend that to say we also have innate brain wiring to always create taboo swear words. It is unavoidable.
For example, the creator of Esperanto didn't put any cuss words in his language because he thought it was unnecessary. (It was a language designed to foster harmony so that's understandable.) Nevertheless, Esperanto evolved to eventually have swear words.
I notice that manufactured languages such as Klingon also has swear words/phrases. However, I'm not a trekkie so I don't know if they elicit any negative emotions or they are there simply as an exercise in "universe building".
Indeed, cursing is considered a fine art among Klingons. One of their aphorisms, translated idiomatically as "Curse well!", literally translates as "Shoot curses forcefully!" They consider curses as weapons which must be propelled to their target, much like throwing knives.
At least one Klingon epithet, petaQ, seems to be used to refer to "someone who has no honor." It was used of Worf by other Klingons during the period of his discommendation.
You bring up an interesting point. There's some neurolinguistic research that points to profanity being more the domain of the amygdala, the so-called "reptilian brain". This is supported by both neuroimaging and studies of patients with aphasia, which show that people with damage to brain regions governing conventional speech can still retain the capacity to swear. Another study suggests that swearing helps the utterer better withstand pain, by stimulating the fight or flight response mechanism centered there.
> one might extend that to say we also have innate brain wiring to always create taboo swear words
That's arbitrary conjecture at best.
A better explanation is that vulgar people will find ways to be vulgar in whatever language they're using, and it will catch on among other vulgar people.
One might as well say we are hardwired to social stratification (which we almost certainly are) and our language reflects that.
Every human society has more-or-less arbitrary rules or fashions, and how closely our behaviour conforms to those rules reflects our social status. This is universal and almost certainly evolved over the course of our million-year-long dance of mate competition and selection.
Since social rules are fairly arbitrary (which we know because they vary so much) there are bound to be situations where it is useful to be able to signal we are moving outside them. Taboo words serve that function very efficiently.
This is a bit different from saying "We are hardwired to have taboo words", but it does show there are perfectly sensible ways to think about hardwiring in this regard, and it's a bit tricky to get away from.
One way of testing this hypothesis would be to look at the distribution of taboo words as a function of the strength and complexity of social hierarchies. I would predict that strongly hierarchical societies with more social restrictions would tend to have more taboo words and likely a finer grading of taboo words than more relaxed societies. On the other hand, if we are more directly hardwired to have taboo words, there would be no reason for the number or gradation to vary across different societies.
>A better explanation is that vulgar people will find ways to be vulgar
I think you're not understanding my "conjecture."
If profanity was purely something propagated by vulgar people, there should be a significant percentage of people where it doesn't trigger any negative emotions at all. Sort of like being "color blind" to shades of green or red, or deaf to hearing "15kHz" sounds such as cymbals.
We humans don't seem to have a brain that treats all phonemes and spellings as equal & arbitrary with no emotions which would render any attempts to create vulgar swear words to be an impossible task. So far, every culture and every language (even new languages) has swear words so I think it is very debatable whether vulgar people create that taboo or our brains already carry a reserved space for offensive communication. If so, that space is receptive for certain words to serve the purpose of offending it. Even if the brain/person has no desire to utter offensive words and further propagate them, they are still offended.
Because we observe directly that many of our humans are distressingly vulgar, and seem to enjoy it. We do not observe, directly or indirectly, "innate brain wiring to always create taboo swear words".
Of course, that leaves unexplained why many (all?) humans enjoy being vulgar...
Lenny Bruce covered this topic back in in his day*, and wasn't afraid to use the actual words instead of euphemisms like in this article. The people trying to censor 'profanity' are the ones who give the words power.
Reinhold Aman did incredibly deep research on verbal aggression through the 1980s and 1990s and was a bit infamous for his radio interviews. Check out the Maledicta website and journal:
Thousands of years ago humans must have discovered that profanity is the universal lubricant -you've got WD40 and you keep your best hammer at hand, but at the very end you know that it will not do without some cursing...
In the year 2015(35 years ago now) anthropologists are still trying to work out why there was such a reduction in profanity. The great indecency purge of 2020 had lead to the systematic removal of any site deemed "backward", "profane", "explicit" or "not politically correct". This was before people willingly checked their privelege. People used the internet, not as a tool of information as we do today, but to debate different points of view and exchange insults on the internet.
As we know, tumblr lead the crusade against these heathens who subjugated minorities and women with their jokes about things like the r-word. As we know this spilled out IRL and lead to a 3000% increase in sexual assualt and violence which was underhandedly covered up by the patriarchy.
With the age of goodthink, we are free from such horrid viewpoints and equality has been spread to accross the globe. Silicon Valley was relocated to Arkansas to rebalance housing prices in the region. Hiring procedures were moved to blanced and equal demographic system, finally, people were judged not as engineers but as numbers filling a quota.
Everything has become ++good, and we may never know why or how profanity was eradicated, but it has lead to the stable society we know and love.
In particular, I find the final point incredibly interesting: black men use the N-word to mean "buddy" and that black culture is becoming much more mainstream. As such others would like to use the vocabulary of black culture without being black.
One would imagine that the increased use of the vocab of black culture would lead to decreased racism. But, if it cannot be used because of the current stigma of non-blacks using the N-word, perhaps this stigma actually increases racism instead of decreasing it.