Wanting to refer to the word “fuck” or “cunt” or “nigger” for the sake of discussion is one thing.
In such cases it makes perfect sense to make clear what word you are referring to without saying it, if you believe that in that context it might be better not to actually say the word. Nobody is fooling anyone and it’s not a game. It’s perfectly sensible.
When you say “if you mean the word fuck,” what you are talking about is using it with the intent that it have all its connotative meaning in context.
In that situation, you might be right that it would be silly to be in an actual argument with someone and say “F-off, you M-F-Ing N-word C-U-N-T B!” because you are hedging and losing some of the social power of the offensive connotations of those words without actually being less offensive.
You see the difference? Talking about the N-word is not remotely the same thing as calling someone a nigger.
And I bet if I could sit down with Louis Székely and explain it to him that way, I could get him to agree. (Although Louis C.K. might not admit it in order to save his bit.)
Well, as a child my mom wasn’t keen on using racial slurs in any capacity. So I was never comfortable with using racial slurs. On occasion I’ve used I did and there was no negative response. The only response was when I was a child and racial slurs were directed at me by black children wanting to fight. In which case I responded in kind and then we fought. But we’d have been fighting regardless of the words I used. Being significantly outnumbered in a black majority school in an urban area means you will get tested.
Weird thing though, I saw just as much racism that was black on black as I did black on white or white on black.
That’s your subjective opinion.
Editing movies is stupid as hell.
PC is dumb and is not about civility. It’s about control.
This claims that the photo is from 1/1/1994 - before the movie was released. If that photo was actually taken then, that means they probably filmed two versions, one normal and one PC-compliant.
I agree with most of your comments in this thread as we have the same position on this, but this is pushing it to a ridiculous extreme – it seems to be saying, “those damned progressives, always trying to control everybody!”. Nonsense, that’s not what it’s about. It’s just a misguided effort to try to change social perspectives by discouraging the use of racially derogatory terms. What makes it so incredibly stupid is that, for all the flak that Maher got over it, no one seemed to have the slightest problem with thousands of media all over the world hosting a clip of him saying it, the result of which is that this thing got a thousand times more worldwide exposure after it blew up than it ever would have within the limited niche of viewers of Real Time with Bill Maher.
That’s the irony of it all. If hearing those words is so toxic, now a thousand times more people have heard it as a result of the controversy, but no one has a problem with that!
Which brings me to this:
I’d like to introduce the nuance of a third distinction: there’s “using a word”, there’s “mentioning a word”, and in the case of words that are traditionally offensive there’s also “using a word ironically or satirically in a way that parodies and thus directly counters its traditionally offensive usage”.
Let me illustrate by example. I linked to this before to illustrate Michael Richards’ racist tirade. This purely a racist being a racist, hateful and disgusting, and Richards deserved everything he got for it. Maher, OTOH, “used” the word, but he used it satirically, purely as a joke. He did not use that epithet against any black person, present or imagined, the way Richards did. If Maher is guilty of simply keeping the word alive in the lexicon, then so are all the thousands of media who repeated it and every black person who uses it every day.
It’s possible that after a very long time, the word may disappear from common usage, but it’s equally possible that with the kind of satirical usage we’re hearing from Maher and from African Americans it may just lose its racist associations with time and just become archaic and comical. Linguists tell us that you can’t control language, it just naturally evolves. Why don’t we just stand up for important things like racial equality, and let the language do whatever the hell it wants?
I don’t think the government made the changes to that film, though.
‘‘Nanny State’’ means government censorship, right?
It was a decision made in some corporate boardroom and dumb edits like that have been happening for decades. I remember as a little kid watching Die Hard and Bruce Wilis going ‘‘ooooooh shooooot!’’ as the plane roared toward him (Was it a plane? he had just popped out of a manhole cover.) It’s dumb, but I’m underwhelmed with outrage. What annoys me is when they don’t even try to edit it to something that would fit the context.
That epic line in The Big Lebowski: ''This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!" was TV-edited to “This is what happens when you find a stranger in the alps!”
If you’re interested in diving down the rabbit hole of censorship, check out the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated. Last I checked, it was on Netflix. Ironically, it was rated NC-17 because it contained clips of all the things it thought shouldn’t be rated NC-17 (like a female orgasm, for example.)
That’s not a very persuasive objection. You might as well complain that broadcasting news footage of somebody committing a murder “ironically” undermines ethical exhortations not to commit murder.
In fact, reporting as news something that’s considered newsworthy because it’s shockingly transgressive in some way is not the same thing as normalizing the transgression, and ISTM that most news viewers understand this.
[QUOTE=wolfpup]
I’d like to introduce the nuance of a third distinction: there’s “using a word”, there’s “mentioning a word”, and in the case of words that are traditionally offensive there’s also “using a word ironically or satirically in a way that parodies and thus directly counters its traditionally offensive usage”. […]
Linguists tell us that you can’t control language, it just naturally evolves. Why don’t we just stand up for important things like racial equality, and let the language do whatever the hell it wants?
[/QUOTE]
Says the guy who just finished telling us how he thinks we should consciously modify our language use by creating a new category for interpretation of terms conventionally considered pejorative. :rolleyes:
As linguists are well aware, and as your own flip-flop on the prescriptivism/descriptivism axis illustrates, for all the common platitudes about language “evolving”, it doesn’t in fact evolve completely independently of language users’ conscious choices and preferences. (Any more than the human species evolves completely independently of humans’ conscious choices and preferences about when and how to have sex.)
There’s no such thing as just “letting language do whatever the hell it wants”: language does whatever the hell we want, where “we” is all of us language users.
:dubious: John, that’s got to be about the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen you post. Admittedly the competition in that category is not very challenging, but still, I’m rather surprised.
Of course the color of one’s skin affects the perception and impact of one’s use of racial epithets. Trying to claim that recognizing that simple inevitable fact is “racist” is nearly as silly as the most hyperbolic caricature of PC “offensensitivity” rhetoric.
You seem in an ornery mood this morning, Kimstu. But let me address your comments as best I can.
This makes no sense. A murder is a horrific act of violence, whereas we’re talking here about the speaking of a word that is considered offensive. Yes, I understand the distinction between “use of” and “mention of”, but in any reasonable interpretation in the context of a slur, “use of” should mean its use as actually a slur, as Michael Richards did – calling someone by that name. Not in even the most bizarre stretch of imagination could Maher possibly be accused of having done that. The only possible rational objection to the way Maher used it is that it serves to keep in the lexicon a word that many wish would go away. And my simple point is that thousands of media did exactly the same thing, and so do millions of African Americans every single day. None of them are even remotely similar to actually uttering a racial slur against someone, unless you, too, believe that it’s all exactly the same as Michael Richards’ rant.
I have no idea what the first sentence means, so I’ll move on to the rest. I have not flip-flopped on prescriptivism/descriptivism but I’ve occasionally been misinterpreted on the subject by various zealots. When I’ve been accused of “prescriptivism” it’s because of my observation that language actually does have rules and words actually do have meanings, and that a common understanding of this corpus is essential to communication. One can accept the broad tenets of linguistic descriptivism and still point out that much non-standard usage arises from ignorance. “Should of” and “would of” are not modal expressions, they are nonsense, and deserve to be corrected. As an aside, I recently read John McWhorter’s latest book which essentially argues that anything that anyone says or writes is just a fine example of correct contemporary English, including texting-speak and emoticons. Like most such ruminations, it’s a blend of valid observations and abject nonsense, but that’s a topic for a different time.
What I’m saying, however, about “letting the language do whatever the hell it wants” is not about idiots who can’t speak or write properly, but about the nuances of what words mean over time, and that there is no central control over the influence of culture and technology on the lexicon. If a word like “nigger” is persistently used in satirical and ironic contexts it eventually loses its power and either becomes (as I said before) an archaic and comedic anachronism or perhaps falls out of the language entirely. That’s why I consider Maher’s use of it to be harmless. Our efforts should be directed to the goal of stamping out racism, not the impossible and meaningless goal of controlling how people use words, especially when such usage can be subject to such stupid misinterpretations.
Maher’s use of the word was “use of”, not “mention of”, even if the use was meant ironically or sarcastically and against himself. That’s why he’s being criticized, and presumably why he apologized.
[QUOTE=wolfpup]
Yes, I understand the distinction between “use of” and “mention of”, but in any reasonable interpretation in the context of a slur, “use of” should mean its use as actually a slur, as Michael Richards did – calling someone by that name. Not in even the most bizarre stretch of imagination could Maher possibly be accused of having done that.
[/quote]
But your notion of “reasonable interpretation in the context of a slur” is narrowly restricted in a very artificial way. Individual language users, just as they can’t arbitrarily make existing words go away, can’t arbitrarily make existing interpretations of words go away.
And it’s a simple fact of the modern (American) English language that the use of the n-word by white people is generally interpreted as having offensive connotations, even if the speaker’s not actually calling a black person by that name. Which I think on some level you know perfectly well: for example, I daresay you don’t go around after an exhausting day remarking that you’ve been “working like a nigger”. That usage isn’t calling anybody else a name, and it could even be read as indirectly complimentary in that it implies that black people are hard-working and indefatigable—but still, you wouldn’t use it.
See also: “nigger”, racial slur, offensive connotations of when used by white people. You can’t just demand that people ignore the “common understanding” of its implications simply because you happen to prefer what seems to you a more logical and sophisticated system of interpretation.
Not that I have no sympathy for your prescriptivist cause: I happen to be a diehard formalist in the matter of style myself, and I am firmly of the opinion that linguistic prescriptivism is a natural and necessary part of linguistic evolution. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t recognize and accept that “rules” and “meanings” aren’t unchanging formal axioms: they evolve and modify based on contemporary patterns of language use. Even when some of those patterns are partly based on ignorance of existing recognized language “rules”, they can still end up effectively and successfully changing those rules.
Sounds to me like pure wishful thinking. Your projected mission to “de-toxify” a racial slur by encouraging uses of it that you personally deem “harmless” doesn’t and cannot take precedence over how such uses are actually perceived.
Fortunately, it takes pretty much zero effort for white people simply to refrain from using the n-word at all, and even to register distaste and disapproval when other white people use it. So we still have plenty of effort left over to direct to the goal of stamping out racism in more substantial ways.
Yes. The offensiveness of his use was on the low end of the scale, and the nature of his apology seems appropriate to me.
He has other blind spots too—diet, vaccines, and health in general. He’s very dumb on that issue. I think I’ve heard him say some stupid things about population growth too. And, even though I agree with him on being an atheist, he is very stupid about religion in general.
But, yes, in general he’s clever. However, I no longer really consider him a must-see.
Originally Posted by John Mace
The idea that the color of your skin dictates which words you can and cannot use is racist.
I said something sort of similar (though I’d characterize it more as ‘counterproductive at this point’ than ‘racist’). I don’t agree it’s dumb. But which doesn’t require me to entirely reject your last sentence. Yes where the person ‘is coming from’ has an effect on interpreting what the person says. It’s part of the context, obviously.
However I think the absolute dictum that ‘white’ people can’t use that word and ‘black’ people can, especially to the extreme it’s sometime taken (a grave offense by a ‘white’ person, but a ‘black’ person, oh OK) has become counterproductive. Again racial identity is a reality to some degree, but that dictum IMO puts too much emphasis on it.
Also it’s now IMO not as clear as it was (say as of MLK ‘I Have a Dream’) that there’s any societal consensus we ever want to have a color blind society. Every reasonable person then realized that wasn’t an every day reality, it’s still not now, though opinions differ how much it’s changed compared to how much it ever would by human nature. But goals and agreement on them matter. To me a permanent categorical difference in who can say what by color undercuts the idea of any goal of de-emphasizing color as a factor in society. It’s emblematic, to me, of the deterioration of that consensus.
My ‘solution’ is simply to make the word ‘off limits’ to everybody (in a social sense, obviously not a legal sense). Of course corrected for context. I don’t mean not referring to the word. I mean for example I don’t think it should more acceptable for a black politico-‘comedian’ similar to Maher* to call themselves a ‘house nigger’ than for Maher to do it. But I do think this is a matter of opinion. If you disagree I would not class your opinion as ‘dumb’.
*eg. Richard Pryor was a comedian, Bill Maher is a(n arguably) witty political commentator keeping the escape hatch available ‘I’m just a comedian’ when needed, those two aren’t directly comparable. Anyway I think a hypothetical suffices, if there is or was a black commentator (‘comedian’) directly comparable to Maher.
Firstly, no, prejudging someone on the basis of their race is racism. Different treatment in itself is not. Extra government assistance for native americans, say, is not racist.
In terms of words, it’s not atypical for a group to be able to use a pejorative in an ironic sense about themselves, but still find it offensive for people outside the group to use that word e.g. queer, gypsy etc.
Secondly no-one is forcing anyone to say anything. You can use that word, just as you can say white people are superior or whatever. And in both cases you will cause offense.
But let me address your comments as best I can.