Can’t a word be just a word?

Have the lunatics taken over the asylum? How long can political correctness continue to rule?

A couple of thousand years or more ago, some religious groups held that the name of God must not ever be spoken, lest personal and global catastrophes ensue.

Speaking the right words, on the other hand, could  bring benefit. “Abracadabra!” could bring all sorts of good things; “Open Sesame!” did open the door of the robbers’ den for Ali Baba; witches could perform all sorts of a magical feats by using the correct incantations, in placing curses or cooking up medicines or poisons.

Words were believed to possess magical powers.

Nowadays, in modernized societies, it is commonly understood that words are merely means of communicating. What a given word communicates depends in part on the competence of the speaker or writer, who may through ignorance or sloppiness or pure accident mispronounce a word or misspell a word or misuse a word. Languages have of all sorts of pitfalls to accurate communication, as when words can mean their own opposite depending on the context [1]: “sanction” can mean to allow or to ban, for  example.

Words inevitably trigger associations, commonly only to other words but sometimes thereby also to thoughts or memories. Psychoanalysis trades on such reflexive associations for insight into a specific individual’s psychology: in that context, words can signify something quite different from a word’s standard usage; thus Freudian analysts have difficulty with the possibility that  “cigar” means only what it says. (Strangers would also do well to avoid using that word at their first encounter with former President Clinton.)

In most social circumstances, however, communication via language is not inhibited by a fear of some magically catastrophic personal or other consequence from the use of a particular word,  be it intentional or accidental. Admittedly, there are temporally changing guidelines as to polite and impolite usages, guidelines that differ from language to language and from time to time. What is regarded as “swearing” might use religious connotations in one language and sexual connotations in another. In much of the English-speaking world, certain four-letter nouns and associated adjectives and verbs were long frowned upon in polite society, though they have now become remarkably commonplace.

Listeners and observers tend to draw conclusions about a speaker’s or writer’s motives, beliefs, and specific intentions, but the potential pitfalls in doing so are innumerable. Indeed,  recent post-modernist schools of English criticism (“deconstruction”) insisted that one could infer absolutely nothing about an author from the words themselves, that the text had its own existence irrespective of what the author wanted  to communicate, or the conclusions which he thought readers would or should draw from what was written.

There is a certain irony in that nowadays social activists who share much of postmodernist attitudes insist at the same time that words and statements are unequivocal signifiers of the speaker’s beliefs and of the social group to which he belongs, and that the mere utterance of a particular word could inflict untold  emotional and psychological harm on even unintended, chance, random hearers or second-hand recipients.

I am referring of course to the N-word, which even Google’s voice-typing facility will not allow me to write, delivering it as n*****.

I have a favorite story about that word and what it might say about the person who utters it.

In 1966 we bought a newly built house in Lexington, Kentucky. We wanted some more tiling work done, and asked the builder, a native Kentuckian of late middle age, to recommend someone to do it. “Well”, he said, “there are two fellows who do that work for me.  One’s white and one’s black, but he’s a good n***** and will do the better job for you”.

 Is a man who recommends a black worker over a white worker a despicable racist for using a word that was common parlance in the society in which he grew up? Surely it is obvious that the word was used with purely descriptive intent, a synonym for “black”, not with any pejorative connotation.

Political correctness has achieved that this word can no longer be used non-pejoratively.

PC vigilantes sometimes expose their ignorance of etymology and history. There were once loud protests over the word “coonties”, which is an anglicized version of a Seminole word and not derived from “coon” — which happens to be a common abbreviation for raccoon, even though the New York Times disallows it as supposedly referring to black people. The Times also disallows “chink”, which used to be the standard way of describing an opening in a knight’s armor. A big fuss about little black-faced statues used as horse-hitching posts exposed ignorance of the fact that they originated in a compliment paid by George Washington to a black youngster [2].

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All the above was stimulated, of course, by the recent dismissal of a popular, respected sports announcer after 20 years of appreciated work, because in describing enthusiastically his visit to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, the way he pronounced “Negro” could be taken as the forbidden n*****:

“While discussing his visit to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City during a pregame segment, Kuiper said  ‘we had a phenomenal day today at the N--- Leagues Baseball Museum and Arthur Bryant’s Barbecue.’”

That was described in headlines as “using racial slur” [3, 4].

Kuiper had long been an announcer for the Oakland A’s, whose “manager Mark Kotsay said the [firing] decision wasn’t made by the team and that he sympathizes with Kuiper. ‘This was a decision made by NBC’” [5].

As though the dismissal were not sufficiently egregious, somehow an additional reputation-damaging innuendo was leaked to the press:

“A person familiar with the investigation said ‘the decision was based on a variety of factors, including information uncovered in the internal review.’ The person spoke on condition of anonymity and didn’t divulge specific details because the network had not publicly disclosed the results of the investigation” [6].

I do not hesitate to speculate that some PR-guru for NBC Sports California thought it necessary to defend their blatant virtue-signaling by insinuating publicly that Kuiper’s enunciation was somehow more than an accidental slip of the tongue. For Political Correctness, accident or chance or mis-pronunciation do not exist. Everything untoward stems from systemic racism, for which there is no conceivable excuse.

NOTES:

[1] See for instance Judith Herman, “Words and phrases that are their own opposites”, 15 June 2018; https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/57032/25-words-are-their-own-opposite

[2] “Diversity and Identity”, keynote address at the 49th Annual Meeting of the American Conference of Academic Deans, Seattle (WA), January 1993; published in several places, most recently in Ben ik wel woke enoeg? (Am I woke enough? A journey through the land of the Social Justice Warriors), ed. Martin Harlaar, https://gompel-svacina.eu/product/ben-ik-wel-woke-genoeg; https://mega.nz/file/EThXlaYZ#vD9XZVPGFDLnIwWY0dW4dS53zd6_RVFyFqpa5Fzzkn8

[3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/athletics/2023/05/22/oakland-broadcaster-glen-kuiper-fired-nbc-sports-racial-slur/70245579007/

[4] https://www.si.com/mlb/2023/05/22/suspended-athletics-broadcaster-fired-racial-slur-glen-kuiper

[5] https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/37709488/a-broadcaster-glen-kuiper-fired-using-racial-slur-air

[6] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/mlb/article-12112981/As-broadcaster-Glen-Kuiper-FIRED-NBC-Sports-using-racial-slur-5-broadcast.html