Jul 22, 2015 11:51 PM
"New taboos have replaced old in terms of profanity. We no longer fear the wrath of God or descriptions of sex. We fear offending groups..."
http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-dare-you...1437168515
EXCERPT: At street level and in popular culture, Americans are freer with profanity now than ever before [...] But things might look different to an expedition of anthropologists visiting from Mars. They might conclude that Americans today are as uptight about profanity as were our 19th-century forbears in ascots and petticoats. It’s just that what we think of as “bad” words is different. To us, our ancestors’ word taboos look as bizarre as tribal rituals. But the real question is: How different from them, for better or worse, are we?
[...] A recent book by Jabari Asim is wholly devoted to outlining the justification and parameters of this arrangement, “The N-Word, Who Can Say It and Why.” Anthropologists call this sort of response the policing of a taboo, much as we might associate that label exclusively with distant lands. Taboos are about what we fear. In one era, it is the wrath of God; in another, hanky-panky; in ours, the defamation of groups.
We may feel that the taboo against discrimination is a moral advance. [...] History does bring progress, as it also has in how we refer to homosexuality. After his lyricist partner Lorenz Hart—who was given to drinking binges—died in 1943, the composer Richard Rodgers grumbled that he had enjoyed writing his latest score by himself, without having to “search all over the globe for that little fag.” A man of Rodgers’s place would be unlikely to say that to the star of his latest show today, and the dismissive expression “that’s so gay” is increasingly on the ropes among anyone with even pretensions of enlightenment.
But we are just as capable as previous eras of policing our taboos with unquestioning excess. An administrator in Washington, D.C.’s Office of the Public Advocate had to resign in 1999 for using the word "niggardly" in a staff meeting.
At the University of Virginia, there was a campus protest in 2003 after a medical school staffer said that a sports team called the Redskins “was as derogatory to Indians as having a team called n— would be to blacks.” Julian Bond, who was then the head of the NAACP, said that only his respect for free speech kept him from recommending that she be fired.
In 2014, the lawyer and writer Wendy Kaminer elicited aggrieved comments for saying, during a panel discussion at Smith College, that when we use euphemisms for the N-word we all “hear the word n— in our head.”
The basic idea that slurring groups is intolerable and unenlightened is welcome and urgent. But we fail to make important distinctions when we reflexively insist that it is a moral abomination even to refer to such words. And usages change.
Many black men use the N-word to mean, basically, “buddy.” As black speech, music, greetings and even demeanor become an increasingly large component of the cultural default setting of young Americans of all colors, we will continue to see nonblacks casually calling each other the N-word in emulation. We should check the impulse to compare such usage to the venom of Bull Connor.
Some might object that we should not check that impulse, and that extremism is necessary to create lasting social change. But it’s useful to recall that, when it comes to profanity, there were once people who considered themselves every bit as enlightened as we see ourselves today, with the same ardent and appalled sense of moral urgency. They were people who said “Odsbodikins” and did everything they could to avoid talking about their pants....
http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-dare-you...1437168515
EXCERPT: At street level and in popular culture, Americans are freer with profanity now than ever before [...] But things might look different to an expedition of anthropologists visiting from Mars. They might conclude that Americans today are as uptight about profanity as were our 19th-century forbears in ascots and petticoats. It’s just that what we think of as “bad” words is different. To us, our ancestors’ word taboos look as bizarre as tribal rituals. But the real question is: How different from them, for better or worse, are we?
[...] A recent book by Jabari Asim is wholly devoted to outlining the justification and parameters of this arrangement, “The N-Word, Who Can Say It and Why.” Anthropologists call this sort of response the policing of a taboo, much as we might associate that label exclusively with distant lands. Taboos are about what we fear. In one era, it is the wrath of God; in another, hanky-panky; in ours, the defamation of groups.
We may feel that the taboo against discrimination is a moral advance. [...] History does bring progress, as it also has in how we refer to homosexuality. After his lyricist partner Lorenz Hart—who was given to drinking binges—died in 1943, the composer Richard Rodgers grumbled that he had enjoyed writing his latest score by himself, without having to “search all over the globe for that little fag.” A man of Rodgers’s place would be unlikely to say that to the star of his latest show today, and the dismissive expression “that’s so gay” is increasingly on the ropes among anyone with even pretensions of enlightenment.
But we are just as capable as previous eras of policing our taboos with unquestioning excess. An administrator in Washington, D.C.’s Office of the Public Advocate had to resign in 1999 for using the word "niggardly" in a staff meeting.
At the University of Virginia, there was a campus protest in 2003 after a medical school staffer said that a sports team called the Redskins “was as derogatory to Indians as having a team called n— would be to blacks.” Julian Bond, who was then the head of the NAACP, said that only his respect for free speech kept him from recommending that she be fired.
In 2014, the lawyer and writer Wendy Kaminer elicited aggrieved comments for saying, during a panel discussion at Smith College, that when we use euphemisms for the N-word we all “hear the word n— in our head.”
The basic idea that slurring groups is intolerable and unenlightened is welcome and urgent. But we fail to make important distinctions when we reflexively insist that it is a moral abomination even to refer to such words. And usages change.
Many black men use the N-word to mean, basically, “buddy.” As black speech, music, greetings and even demeanor become an increasingly large component of the cultural default setting of young Americans of all colors, we will continue to see nonblacks casually calling each other the N-word in emulation. We should check the impulse to compare such usage to the venom of Bull Connor.
Some might object that we should not check that impulse, and that extremism is necessary to create lasting social change. But it’s useful to recall that, when it comes to profanity, there were once people who considered themselves every bit as enlightened as we see ourselves today, with the same ardent and appalled sense of moral urgency. They were people who said “Odsbodikins” and did everything they could to avoid talking about their pants....