[Marxism] Re: Last word on whore and "farewell"

[Brian Shannon <brian_shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jun 3, 2006, at 3:26 PM, Fred Feldman wrote:

> I remember that a discussion started off in the Militant staff because
> someone used the term "niggardly" in an article.  A Black reader found
> this offensive because, well, the first two syllables sound exactly
> like
> "nigger."  The answer was to tell the reader sharply that the word was
> not racist and to show from the Oxford English Dictionary that it had
> old English origins.  And not only that, the Militant (this was a
> bit of
> Barnes hysteria added to the mix) began to use the word "niggardly" as
> much as possible (they were waging war at the time against political
> correctness -- the tendency of the oppressed who have become conscious
> and active to take oppressed at various expressions of the existing
> situation).

I had forgotten this. An interesting aspect of this is the nitpicking
attitude that was taken on this compared to the open discussion on
whether to begin using Black and Afro-American (this was before it
was generally accepted that African-American was preferred). I
believe that there was a long discussion on this. Of course,
niggardly was completely correct, but much of the issue is the same.
As Fred pointed out, if there is an objection, including an objection
over some confusion due to formal similarity of words, why not drop
it. Simply go the the thesaurus.

The same applies to "gay" and "queer." No one today would say I had a
gay time without understanding its modern overtones. And I haven't
heard anyone recently say that a deal or arrangement was "queered"
due to someone's action.

Amusingly, I started to write that The Militant had taken an anal
attitude regarding hair splitting. Then I noticed that perhaps I
should drop the word anal and then decided to drop it entirely,
reasoning that Marxmail didn't need another comment, especially since
I sent a short one along Fred's line yesterday. However, my computer
had a mind of its own and sent the aborted message instead of
deleting it. I am only writing this because the earlier one was sent
and I figured that I had better finish the original idea and explain
my error.

If someone thinks that I was being clever or ironic, "think again" as
Bobby says (Law and Order, Criminal Intent).

Anyone who had a chance to read Philip's Roth fascinating book, The
Human Stain, will remember similar confusion when professor Silk
refers to two students who had missed class as being spooks (ghosts).
Unfortunately for him, the students were African-American and, if my
memory is correct, the professor decided to insist that he was right,
whereas he could have gotten out of it with a reasonable explanation.


Brian




________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism