I’m fascinated by language — by how we use it, by how it shapes us, by how we shape it.
If unconscious use of language is interesting, so, too, is the conscious effort of individuals to change and manipulate language, whether in advertising or propaganda, or in declaring certain euphemisms to be approved, and other terms to be forbidden.
Which makes this review of Randall Kennedy’s Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word fascinating, almost enough for me to add the book to my Wish List. Kennedy’s description of the history of the word, from neutral description to vile epithet and up to the modern acceptable usage within certain African-American circles, sounds extremely interesting — as has been the firestorm surrounding the book, by the mere fact that it uses That Word in the title.
That word is one that I do not believe I have ever used, except perhaps in relation to an ethnic joke (and then rarely, back in the days when The Italian-American Joke Book drew guffaws, not law suits). It’s a word I did hear sometimes, growing up, but not a word I hear any more in my acquaintances, certainly not as the “paradigmatic” racial slur that Kennedy describes — a word that a many vocal people believe should be forcibly stamped out of the language.
Interesting stuff.
But just to show how potentially sensitive a subject this is, even though it’s a frickin’ book title, I still used the embed-a-comment-inside-the-word HTML coding trick on The Word inside the title. That’s one Google search term (not to mention corporate web content filter) I’m not interested in showing up on.