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Sticks, stones and the n-bomb
By Stephen Lewis
slewis42@mscd.edu

All in one week, the New York City Council banned the n-word, a California couple sued a school district after their daughter was disciplined for saying “That’s so gay,” and the incomparably asinine Ann Coulter called a presidential candidate a “faggot.” Perhaps it’s time to re-examine the power of the spoken (or written) word.

Words have always been individually and politically powerful. The arbitrary collection of books that comprise the New Testament, Mao’s “Little Red Book” and Martin Luther’s 95 Theses are just a few examples of words that have inspired change – for better and for worse – and have caused death and destruction well beyond their original intent.

In the Middle Ages, literacy was a tool available only to the clergy and the educated nobility, and their control of words meant control of society. Conversely, all across the globe today, literacy liberates people, allows them to educate themselves, search for their own information and become politically aware.

Yet with the good comes some bad, and over the years some words change meaning or nuance accidentally. However, words, which are abstract ideas, can be hijacked, kidnapped and mutated, willfully misappropriated as tools to dehumanize and encapsulate ideas of hate.

The n-word derives from the perfectly acceptable Latin niger, meaning black, with some help from the Spanish negro and French negre. Widely used in colonial America and the U.K., it was not initially a derogatory term, but somewhere along the line it became the verbal repository for ignorance, shame and repression. To counter this, a significant portion of the black community uses the word, albeit with a spelling variant, in an attempt to diminish the power of the word.

I believe it was a Jewish comedian, Lenny Bruce, who pioneered this in his comedy routines, believing that repetition meant dilution. While there is clearly some validity to this argument and this approach to dealing with obscenity, it can invite misunderstanding. The New York decision, while clearly not enforceable, makes its point.

“Mirthful and light-hearted” are two definitions of gay in my Oxford dictionary, and even in my lifetime, that was what gay meant. It did not automatically denote sexuality as it does today, and I still consider it neutral, conferring neither approval nor disapproval. However, the principal of Maria Carillo High School in Santa Clara, Calif., begs to differ, and so our litigious society finds work for two more lawyers. The latest trend in teen epithets is clearly now beyond me, but I am not sure this rises to crime.

Faggot, on the other hand is most definitely the gay equivalent of the n-bomb, a deliberate and calculated hateful slur that one would only expect from a professional rabble-rouser and shrieking Valkyrie like Coulter, whom no one in their right mind would employ unless they were Rupert Murdoch. Its origin is obscure, though a hasty trip to Wikipedia gives three explanations: 1) A bundle of sticks for burning homosexuals, 2) old unpleasant women and 3) the slightly less convincing Yiddish word faygele, meaning little bird.

So what to do: use a word, ignore it, defuse it, discuss it? As my dear old granny used to say, “If you can’t say anything nice …”