The BBC has run a story about some racist trousers. No, that’s not quite accurate. The trousers themselves are blameless but some of the marketing copy used to describe them accidentally included a racist phrase. No, wait, even that doesn’t quite cover it. The copy juxtaposed two entirely banal and innocent words that some racists have also juxtaposed because when combined they sound like a word that isn’t regarded as acceptable any more.
And already I face a dilemma. If I mention those two words (either of which in isolation is still acceptable in polite society) I’ll be implicated in the normalisation of racist discourse, albeit racist discourse of a particularly sniggering, juvenile kind. And if I don’t I’ll just be falling into the same trap as the BBC, and running a story that, for most readers, makes absolutely no sense. So I’ll take the cowardly middle path and link to a page that explains the phrase, ringfencing that link with all the necessary warnings about offence and triggers and maybe a few phone numbers in case it gets too much.
Because we are in a time of Voldemort words, when some language is seen as so dangerous and despicable that it can’t be mentioned even in situations where the language – as distinct from the thing the language describes – is the whole point of the story. In the case of the trousers, this is despite the fact that the verboten phrase was consciously invented to bypass such censorship, standing as it does for another word that’s even worse. The forces of moral purity are inevitably playing a game of ethical Whac-a-Mole, chasing down each iteration of evolving ideological impurity in turn, always a few steps behind. This despite the fact that the bad word – not the phrase used in the trousers copy, but the word that that phrase replaced – was until a few decades ago entirely unremarkable and happily deployed by the same people that it is now used to demonise. And, in some contexts, still is.
And as always with taboo language, this is only apparent if you are already aware of the bad syllables and if this is the case presumably you’ve already been subject to the harm they might present. Unless, of course you are part of some enlightened elect that can come into contact with the words and emerge unscathed. I’m reminded of the tendency of translators of Boccaccio in the 19th and early-20th centuries to leave the sauciest bit of the story in the original language, as if those bright enough to understand medieval Italian would be less corruptible than the rest of us.
The tale of Earl Butz is also relevant; he was fired as Nixon’s agriculture secretary for making a joke that was at the same time racist, scatological and entirely unfunny, but the primness of contemporary media meant that it was difficult for the casual observer to deduce what it was he’d said to provoke his ejection. (In our own time, the all-encompassing label of “inappropriate” would be applied.)
And finally, Conrad’s book that I suppose we should now call “The N-word of the Narcissus” or something similar. Except that when it was first published in the United States, it was called The Children of the Sea. Not because the language in the original title might be thought offensive to the ethnic group that it described (few in 1897 cared about that) but because white people might be dissuaded from buying a book about that ethnic group.
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