The Story of the N-Word

The Story of the N-Word

Shakespeare’s Juliet rhetorically asked, “What’s in a name?” We may all ask, and not rhetorically, What’s in a word, especially a certain word?

Words have meanings and have different meanings for different people. That’s not a very profound statement, I know, but it’s more relevant today than it ever used to be although it depends on the nature of the word.

President Bill Clinton notoriously played with words back in 1998 during his grand jury testimony. He veered into existentialism by painstakingly parsing the third person singular, president indicative of the verb “be:” “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the–if he–if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not–that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement. . . Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true.”

Amazingly, he wasn’t thrown out of office on the basis of that gobbledegook alone!

Since then, others have fared much worse, not for their misuse of the word “is” but because of their use of another word deemed not merely offensive but damned as so vile it no longer qualified for inclusion in either the spoken or written English language.

Wikipedia provides the history of “nigger:” “The variants neger and negar, derive from the Spanish and Portuguese word negro (black), and from the pejorative French nègre (nigger). Etymologically, negro, noir, nègre, and nigger ultimately derive from nigrum, the stem of the Latin niger (black) (pronounced [niɡer]“

In the last decade, that emotionally-charged word has taken on a life, and death, of its own.

To my knowledge, “nigger” is the only word ever to be consigned to language oblivion–except for black rappers and for any other blacks of a mind to use it–and is widely regarded as so offensive that even usage of words that sound like “nigger” have earned the users eternal ignominy.

Also, to my admittedly limited knowledge, “nigger” is the only word ever buried–by the Philadelphia NAACP Youth Council in 2007– and is one of the few words that can in and of itself constitute a hate crime.

Back in 1999, white staffer David Howard of black Washington, D.C. mayor Anthony Williams learned the message of word associations the hard way when, in his ignorance, Williams demanded Howard’s resignation because Howard had used the word “niggardly” in a staff meeting. It didn’t matter that “niggardly” meant “stingily” and had nothing to do with race or color.

Meanings and common sense aside, niggardly sounded like a racial slur . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=3324)