The Evolution of Profanity
wsj.com
wsj.com
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.
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.
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.
I use the more politically correct version "white trash comes in all colors."
But because it's about poor "non-sophisticated" people, and there's no middle-class guilt about it, nobody cares...
(British have a similar term, "chav", for younger working class people).
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 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.
The "wise elder" is actually quite a prevalent trope. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicalNegro
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 happened sometime in the 90s, with the rise of mainstream rap. The stigma didn't seem to diminish.
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).
I'm white I don't say it and it made me uncomfortable at first (now I couldn't care less).
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).
> 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 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?
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!
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?
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>!
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".
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.
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.
Of course, that leaves unexplained why many (all?) humans enjoy being vulgar...
That's also how comedy works, even without using any vulgar words.
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.
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.
http://harvardsciencereview.com/2014/01/23/the-science-of-sw... http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-we-swear/
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.
Alex Alexis
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non-binary, pan-sexual, pronouns: xe/xem/xyr/xemself/co/cos/cos/coself