Ed Tasca

I think I understand the thing about the n-word. I think. You know, the infamous expression no one is permitted to utter.

Yes, of course, some words carry unpleasant charges meant to sting and hurt and belittle. It’s age-old.  But the n-word was never alone. There are plenty of women, past and present I believe, who are offended by the c-word. And we all know many older folks can become pretty upset on hearing the f-word, publicly or even privately. That’s why we have so many variations for the f-word, maybe more variations than any other word in the history of language.

Once, as a young man, I recall, someone skewering me with a racial slur. It wasn’t pleasant being called the d-word (I’m of Italian descent). And as demanded by my punk, gang-inspired background, I struck back instantly at the offender, ruefully calling him the k-word (he was Jewish).

Around the same time, if I didn’t want to displease my mother, I was prohibited from ever mentioning in my home a certain criminal organization with which Italian-Americans had a particularly well-known association, if not an actual calling. This, of course, would have been the m-word.  It was common in those days to create a Periodic Table of taboo words, everyone keeping unmentionables unmentionable and feeling a whole lot better about themselves.

And it wasn’t just the traditional guardians of social grace, the women, who did this. A good male friend of mine, embarrassed by his body and its various organs, found it distasteful to utter the t-word (preferring stones, balls and garbanzos). There were many such offensive words in those days.  It was a form of euphemismism where everybody pretended that if you didn’t say it, it didn’t exist.

A good example was my poor, innocent cousin.

She had to marry quite suddenly her boyfriend of only two months because she was the p-word. And my aunts and uncles, knowing full-well she had engaged promiscuously in the f-word, tried desperately to escape the idea that she’d lost her v-word and was going to have a b-word child and wind up in the h-word. (This was the typical, repressed, Catholic Italian family of a few decades ago.)  

During that time, a b-word child surely meant eternity in the h-word, unless the p-word woman married the guy with the incriminating t-word (plural). What was ironical was that everyone trusted the guy because they thought he was a q-word (it was the way he sort of pranced when he walked). Now, all of this, the v-word, the p-word, the b-word, the t-word, the f-word and possibly even most egregiously, the q-word, combined to condemn my entire gd-word family to the prospect of the h-word, or so our beloved pastor led us to believe.

If my cousin didn’t marry the guy with the incriminating t-word (plural), and wasn’t willing to consider the religiously taboo a-word, insisting on giving issue to the b-word child, she faced being hounded out of town under the onslaught of the w-word, leaving our family’s reputation worth nothing more than the s-word. Anyway, she did get married, and the day had been saved by the simple process of whispering initials and declaring how often first babies arrive early.

Today, the sting of all these words  and their associated significances are gone. We hear them spoken as trippingly as the days of the week.  They are, after all, just words.  Their significances and connotations are largely the result of how they are uttered. The same is true for the n-word. No matter how you choose to reconstruct this word when spoken or written, the original word will always be there in the shadows laughing at you.

What word comes into your mind when I write the expression “n-word”? Not nightmare or nabobs or nemesis. Not even Nazi. There’s now only one word that comes to mind when you hear people refer to the n-word. (Unless you’re a chemist, in which case the n-word would be sodium, which isn’t offensive, except to people with high blood pressure.)

That one word we’re talking about is nigger. It’s coarse and demeaning, and it’s provocative in its historic context. It probably has no significant value in our linguistics other than as an abusive expression. But it feels infantile and silly for me not to write it here.  It’s just a word, a clutch of letters, two syllables, that gives us a sound. But it has become a taboo utterance. (And taboo utterances went out with the druids and their unmentionable gods thousands of years ago.) Is this the kind of almighty power with which we wish to endow unutterable words? There is not another word in the English language that I know of, which is literally unutterable.

So what does this tell us about ourselves when academics, journalists and writers such as myself cannot write out the letters of a word or utter it verbally even though it exists in our finest literature, the common usage and in the minds of almost everyone living on the planet?

I think it says we have to stop pretending. If the n-word prophylactic were applied throughout our lexicon, there would be thousands of words that could be cited as offensive to someone, somewhere, in some context or other.  Why try to disguise our own ugliness by blaming it on a word? Banishing the word doesn’t remove the cause of its existence, just like the whispered p-word decades ago never changed the fact that my cousin got herself knocked up.