I know it’s early in the year and it’s always possible something
better could come along, but I’m willing to end the balloting now
and hand out the 2003
”
Button Your Lip, America: The First Amendment Freedom From
Speech Award
”
to the Santa Clara County Human Relations Commission for it’s
recent courage in chasing an offensive word from the lexicon.
I know it’s early in the year and it’s always possible something better could come along, but I’m willing to end the balloting now and hand out the 2003 “Button Your Lip, America: The First Amendment Freedom From Speech Award” to the Santa Clara County Human Relations Commission for it’s recent courage in chasing an offensive word from the lexicon. Good job, folks, and good luck.
The word – no surprise here – now has it’s very own pseudonym; we call it “the N-word.” Now if you grab your Webster’s and look in the “N” section you will find a large and varied assemblage of N-words, but of course we all know that there can be only one N-word that is THE N-word. Trouble is, it’s now declared to be such a toxic utterance that we have to call on people to just understand that by “the N-word” we mean THAT word.
I mean, get this, straight from the San Jose paper: “Late last month, the commission unanimously passed the resolution [to “denounce” the word] in ‘spirit and concept.’
But the formal vote was tabled because activists noticed that the actual N-word had been omitted in the resolution’s text, and they insisted it be put back in.” So they can’t even chance using the N-word itself in a resolution condemning it’s use, which can, technically speaking, create a problem since there’s this general idea in the law that prohibited conduct is supposed to be spelled out so even the most dense among us know what it is they’re not supposed to be doing.
Politically expedient though it may be, outlawing a word as a hate crime, which is the stated goal of the resolution’s backers, probably can’t be done with a statute that reads “It shall be unlawful for any person to utter the word which shall be henceforth herein referred to as ‘the N-word,’ standing for the word – well, you know, that ugly word that starts with N and rhymes with another word that means ‘larger,’ but if you still can’t figure it out you can write to the State Legislature with three boxtops from any General Mills cereals and we’ll send you a secret decoder ring that will make it perfectly clear which word you’re going to jail if you use, but damned if we’re going to use it herein because then we’d have to jail ourselves.”
That’s some scary word. I mean, if this gets out we’re liable to find ourselves at the mercy of sleeper cells of heartless foreign linguists going around the country saying that word over and over again just to bring this proud nation to its knees in a debilitating wave of verbo-terrorism. Tom Ridge will have to take to the airwaves to explain to everyone how to make earplugs out of duct tape. “Don’t panic – if you hear the N-word just walk quickly upwind, taking only your necessary valuables, and seek shelter in the nearest soundproof recording studio.”
But of course the real threat will come when people who once were inclined to use the fatal word, either as an insult to someone else or as a slightly-twisted self-referential badge of honor the way hip-hop artists like to employ it – start actually saying “N-word” in place of the banned term. Then the Human Rights Commission will have to pass a resolution banning the term “N-word” itself. But they’ll need a temporarily-inoffensive substitute for “N-word.” See the start of a pattern here?
We’ll have to sanitize our vocabularies one word at a time, until the only thing left that anyone can say is, “You want fries with that?” which already forms the core of American speech. Oh, wait; I think the FDA has recently developed a problem with “fries.”
Robert Mitchell practices law in Morgan Hill. His column has appeared in The Dispatch for more than 20 years. It’s published every Tuesday.
