HATE WORDS ARE NOT “INAPPROPRIATE”

(For free downloads of the Hot Plate! show, please email karlstraub@hotmail.com. He'll respond pret-ty quickly, unless he's in the shower or something. Even that loophole will close soon, as he's looking into a new app that allows extreme entrepreneurs to retain full phone functionality even in the shower.) 

The English language (USA edition) is like Tinkerbell.

   It’s adorable and sparkly, even sexy. It has magical wings that can take it anywhere, so it can pop up at any time and insinuate itself into any situation, but it can also hover safely around unpleasantness, using its ballerina grace to dodge any crass attempts to squash it. Paradoxically, it’s also a drama queen shot through with pettiness, and periodically puts on a big show of teetering on the brink of death, guilt-tripping people into validating it by loudly professing how much they believe in it. 

  If our language is dying, it’s because people no longer reach for it when there’s another device at hand. If reading is dying, this is because people don’t find words alone satisfying enough for entertainment, and they don’t find them sufficiently effort-free to be the best way to get information.

Words need help, if we’re going to listen to them. Give us a video of an attractive person saying the words, and we’ll consider listening to them. If we must have face-to-face interaction using words, we’re going to need to use our faces and voices and even arms and legs to help clarify our meaning. 

If it’s a road sign, we’ll need to use ancient hieroglyphics along with the words. If we must read words on social media, give us a picture of a celebrity arching his eyebrows along with the words, so we can feel something.

  I like talking about this sort of thing, because the responses to it immediately suggest that language will never die. Language is still a go-to communication tool if you want to dismiss another person’s words. When you want to quash those who disagree with you, violence isn’t always convenient, and if you go too far there’s always the danger that you’ll create a martyr.   But for a quick fix with no overhead, you can’t beat namecalling. Namecalling is quick, it’s easy, and it’s effective. 

  Kids learn about this early. School is, to some extent, a laboratory where kids learn how to deal with other people. Calling a kid a name on the schoolyard is the beginning of our current political system, where an insulting name shuts down discussion and manufactures consent. If you’re called a name, there’s no real defense for it because a name seems so final. This is why otherwise sophisticated people get so much enjoyment (presumably) from getting our president’s name hilariously wrong, and why the word “libtard” was created. It’s also why Donald Trump’s use of namecalling struck many voters as refreshing rather than ugly, and why liberals indignant about it are being disingenuous. 

 Namecalling is useful because it basically says, because my enemy is a such and so, we can and should ignore everything he says. The irony of political correctness is that it shuts down discussion the same way openly accepted prejudice does. I agree that racism is bad, for example, but I don’t like the idea of casually labeling someone a racist because I don’t like the implication that we now can avoid considering his or her other statements. The main reason for my ambivalence about the term antisemite is that I don’t like the implication that whatever an antisemite may do to protect his family can’t earn our empathy. 

  As adults, we sometimes debate all of this highfalutin jibber jabber, but teens are a different story. For the teen, compromised by hormones, peer pressure, and corn syrup, namecalling may seem like an innocuous tool in the daily struggle to appear comical. I saw what I assume was an example of this in a Subway the other day, when a kid wearing a school uniform yelled out the most popular hate word ever used to slur gay men, in order to get a laugh from at least one of his fifteen male friends standing there with their hands in their pockets. 

  This pissed me off at the time, and I had a sort of inner liberal debate over whether I should say something. “Saying nothing” was the box I eventually ticked, but it continued to bother me later. I’d seen the episode of “Louie” where a gay comic explained the etymology of this word, how it dated back to an era where the conflating of gay men with kindling you’d throw on a bonfire seemed humorous. That particularly barbaric slur is one I like to try hard to forget about, as I not only had it used to describe me, but I used it to describe others. It could be barked with a certain tone, to indicate real nasty hatefulness and menace, but also was and presumably still is popular in certain manly circles when males want to kid around with other males. I haven’t heard it out loud for many years, because I’m no longer required by the state to spend a certain number of hours each week standing around in a locker room. But when I was a kid, the word was so common it could be used in a joking and innocuous way among boys who thought they were being cute. I don’t like trash talk, but because of certain effete prejudices I’m not willing to drop, I particularly hate the trash talk that’s supposed to be innocuous. 

  Somehow, in a mere three decades, I’ve gone from Lenny Bruce to Gladys Cravats. (For those sad souls who don’t already know this, she was the tiresome busybody on Bewitched. Which was a show about how witchcraft infests our white suburbs and affects the advertising business, as well as the liquor industry.)  I emailed the school to tell them about what I’d heard, after initially posting about it on our neighborhood listserv. Feel free to judge me for doing this, as some appeared to. 

  The responses to my post included several people who used words like “inappropriate” to describe the slur. This echoed the long-ago week when we were all upset about the “pussy grabbing” bootleg tape, except for those who characterized it as “locker room talk.” This phrase was supposed to mean that it was juvenile but harmless, like telling fart jokes might be. 

  This intrigued me, because it clearly suggests that I’m a sort of ninny, or schoolmarm, who’s too old and uncool to realize that boys will be boys. Besides, old man, you were a boy once too and you did the same thing, so you’re also a hypocrite. 

  It’s precisely because of my own experience that I decided in the end to pick the ninny option. That, and the “Louie” thing. People have different learning styles. Some learn better by reading, some learn better in the audible world, and I’m one of those who learns most easily by watching sitcoms. 

  But, as I pompously intoned in my email to the school, this could be an opportunity to teach the students that this particular word has an origin that ought to sicken even an intolerant person. (I didn’t mention “Louie” in the email.) 

  I wouldn’t be writing about this now if this teen had been making fart noises with his hands. It’s not clear to me that an incident like that would have inspired me to this degree, because it would be hard to write about it at any length. 

  It’s because a hate word isn’t just inappropriate, it’s frighteningly reminiscent of lynching and burning people at the stake and the dunking stool and all the other things that are as American as apple pie. Inappropriateness, to me, is a thing governing the world of shirt buttons and fork choice. (Let me just say that if you regularly find yourself in a place where fork choice is a thing, you probably have white privilege.)