On Linguistics and Profanity: a response to the Albatross

The following is an opinion piece written by a student inside Hamden Public Schools. The pseudonym “Behemoth” is used for privacy.

Whether The Albatross is aware of it or not, they have become
quite the sensation within Hamden High. In the weeks since their
account of microaggressions training was published in the Tribune,
they’ve turned many students into amateur sleuths. I’ve heard many
theories on who they are, none of which have much evidence outside
of gut feelings. Since then students have waited early for their next
post, and sure enough, and on March 15th, The Albatross provided.

Reactions are varied, from “racist” to “facts” (although mainly “racist”,
but I have a feeling that isn’t a surprise to Albatross based on what
they’ve said themselves). Personally, I agree with the majority of The
Albatross’ March 3rd article, however, they did lose me near the end
with their comments on “White privilege”.

Personal opinions aside, my reason for writing this concerns
their March 15th article, which serves as a follow-up to the previous
article. The ending of this article ends with a passionate rant on the
use of the “N-word” within Hamden High. The Albatross talks about
how this word, “Destroys a learning environment,” and “Is at odds
with intellectual life.” I simply cannot agree with this statement. I
don’t think The Albatross understands, or is simply misinformed,
about how this word is used and its impacts. It is not as hostile as
they believe.

I think it is important to start with how this word came into
everyday speech in the first place. When ships took kidnapped
Africans and forced them into slavery, many of them wound up in
the South and were sold to the racist owners of plantations to work
the field and to act as personal servants in their estates.

It was in this environment that there was a linguistic convergence, that of various African languages and Southern American English.

Here, Africans learned English to understand their slavers and as they did they picked up parts of Southern English (notably the word “y’all”). Over
the years this dialect developed unique features not seen in the
South. Examples include the dropping of ‘r’, turning “water” into
“watuh”; and pronouncing ‘t’ and ‘th’ as ‘d’, turning “that” into “dat”.
Alongside the new accent, many new slang terms were coined, but we
will get to that later. This new dialect is now referred to by linguists
as AAVE (African-American Vernacular English).

Despite the name, it does not mean that it is only spoken by African-Americans, there are many Whites who speak it and many Blacks who don’t.
The civil war came and went, as did Reconstruction, until the turn of the century, around the 1910s to be exact. Faced with the rise of Jim Crow, violence caused by the end of Reconstruction, and the crippling poverty of the rural South, many African-Americans moved northward into cities in a period known as the “Great Migration”.

This resulted in many urban areas having high Black populations, a
trend we see still today. The Migration also saw Black people begin to
flex their muscles with the Harlem Renaissance during the Roaring
Twenties and the formation of many Black-oriented societies such as
the NAACP and Black Panthers. It was around this time as well we
see the first notable recognition of a new, more liberal, use of the
word “nigger”, that being in James W. Johnson’s 1912 book The
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Here it is written, “I noticed
that among this class of colored men the word “nigger” was freely
used in about the same sense as the word “fellow,” and sometimes as a
term of almost endearment; but I soon learned that its use was
positively and absolutely prohibited to white men.” (Johnson, 1912).

The new use of the word, often pronounced and/or written as
“nigga” due to the aforementioned r-dropping seen in AAVE, truly
became mainstream in the ‘70s through ‘90s when rap and hip-hop,
traditionally Black-lead music genres, became popular. Over time the
word’s exclusivity to Blacks became less and less prominent as its use
carried over to Whites who grew up in Black neighborhoods and
spoke in AAVE since everyone around them did.

Some of these few White speakers would go on to achieve fame, such as Eminem, and their use of the word would ignite some discussion on the topic. The word’s racist origin still loomed large, but by the late 2000s, most of this hesitancy had been stripped away as “nigga” became less racist
and more a part of daily speech and slang. There is still some hesitancy, but this is, from what I see, a minority.

This leads us to the question of the hour, should “nigga” be considered a slur? No. The origin of the term being used among African-Americans likely stems from a context of empowerment.

The most used slur against Blacks throughout history has been “nigger”,
so what better way to get back at these racists than to take their slur
away from them and use it as your own? “Wanna call me a nigger?
Well too bad, me and my friends already use the word amongst
ourselves and we don’t make it offensive. What are you gonna do
about it?!” This isn’t even the only example of this we see in the
history of civil rights. In the LGBT movements of the ‘80s and ‘90s,
lesbians began holding the Dyke March, a protest whose name uses
the anti-lesbian slur “dyke” in much the same way as “nigga”.

Over the course of Indigenous history, “Indian” has grown to become the
most used term of self-identification both on and outside reservations, despite the fact of its confused origins in European colonialism. This phenomenon has even spread into politics with “woke” and “anti-vaxxer” becoming identifiers in their respective communities despite both having origins as insults. “Nigga” even goes a step further, becoming so commonplace that even the anti-racist use of the word has, mostly, been worn down leading to today, a time in which the word is used simply as a term of kinship and identity.

I’d honestly be hesitant to even classify it as vulgar given how non-offensive it has become in speech. Nowadays, being a “nigga” to someone would likely be more of a compliment rather than something to take offense towards. Now that we’ve established that the word isn’t as hostile as The Albatross makes it out to be, let’s move on to their second argument, that the use of the word isn’t good in the learning environment. I also have to disagree with this.

“Nigga”, as I’ve said, is barely even profane anymore, it’s just a word. Words are what we make them. Many words that are considered profane were, at one point, just words and it was society that decided they were profane. “Shit” derives from the Anglo-Saxon word “scitte” while the less offensive counterpart, “poop”, comes from the French “pupe”. The split offensiveness isn’t a coincidence. During the Norman occupation of Britain, a time in which the English language really became what we know it as today, it was French that was spoken by the nobility of the island while the peasantry of the island primarily spoke Anglo-Saxon. Since the peasants were looked down upon as being dirty and poor, it’s no wonder that using their language became seen as taboo while using the classy and dignified Norman French was seen as “correct”.

This comes across in less bathroom-related examples as well, “I had some
cow at the diner,” is grammatically incorrect while, “I had some beef at the diner,” isn’t. “Cow”, as you can probably guess, comes from the Anglo-Saxon “cū”, while “beef ” comes from the French “boef ”. Words aren’t inherently offensive or inoffensive, it’s the speaker who makes the word offensive. I can make the word “woodcutter” an insult if I angrily direct it at foresters enough times. The universe didn’t one day declare that putting the letters f-u-c-k together is obscene because the universe is indifferent to Latin characters, its
obscenity was created by us and our disgust towards sex. So while people using profanities to insult one another is beyond a reasonable doubt a hostile learning environment it isn’t the words at fault.

In the same way I can call somebody I don’t like a “motherfucker”, I can also
use the same word without directing it at anybody, as in, “I had the best motherfucking cow at the diner last night.” Once the word isn’t being used to insult somebody it ceases to be offensive, again, because I’m not using it as an insult, I’m using it as an intensifier.

It is this use of “profanity” as an intensifier I hear the most in school, and it is also the type of language I hear the most criticized in school. It must be at least three times a day that I hear a teacher yell, “Language!” at someone walking by their classroom. I never hear people in school insulting each other, speech that is actually unwelcome in school and does create a hostile learning environment.

When I do hear some use profanity as an insult 99.9% of the time it is among friends or done in jest. It is hostility that “destroys a learning environment”, not words.

“Nigga”, as I’ve stated, is not being used to insult people or create racial superiority in Hamden High, it is merely slang that, while originating with a racial slur, is no longer being used as such. It’s quite funny, if a bit worrying, that the majority of people I see, both in school and outside, claiming that “nigga” is just as bad as “the hard-r” to spread bigotry don’t even speak AAVE themselves! I have yet to hear one person discourage the use of “nigga” as passionately as The Albatross has while speaking AAVE the entire time. Now
admittedly, The Albatross may speak in AAVE themselves–I don’t know, however, by the way they write I highly doubt it. Hearing people label others as speaking “badly” is quite worrying to see given how it plays into the myth of a “correct” way to speak English, a myth which was built from people who would actually use “nigger” as a slur.

When we think of people speaking “bad” English our minds, whether we want to admit it or not, go to people with thick foreign accents and using dense slang. There is no such thing as bad English, just low intelligibility. Someone who isn’t fluent in English isn’t speaking “bad” English, it’s just that their way of speaking isn’t easily understood by the majority of English speakers. For example, Russian doesn’t have articles (“a” and “the”) so when Russians learn English they often drop articles when they speak, turning, “The price of the food here is high,” into, “Price of food here is high.” This may be hard for a native English speaker to wrap their head around but for a fellow Russian English learner speaking like this is completely logical, after all, they lived their whole never differentiating an object from the object. You may say they’re fluent in “Russian English”.

Their English isn’t wrong, it would just be hard for most English-speaking people to understand, making speaking without articles inefficient since the whole reason they’re learning English is to better communicate with people who speak it.

Using slang and profanity isn’t “detrimental to the pursuit of knowledge” since it isn’t “bad” English and therefore has no impact. They’re just words. Talking about a subject with frequent swearing isn’t wrong, it’s just a different way of speaking. Telling people that their way of speaking is inherently wrong is a very slippery slope. I saw a while ago some ultra-progressive person tell off someone Hispanic for not using “LatinX” when referring to themselves, a term given to Hispanic Americans despite the fact it is never actually used in daily speech. When will people learn to let others just speak the way they speak instead of telling them the “correct” way to do so? If that way of speaking includes frequent swearing, so be it. After all, who are you to tell them how they should or shouldn’t speak? The task The Albatross wants to undertake here in addressing the use of “nigga” is the same task we’ve seen hundreds of language regulators across the world attempt and fail at, “fixing” a language. Be it France’s Académie Française trying to stop people from using English words in French, or the Oqaasileriffik in Greenland deciding names for babies and places, people are always failing to wrangle the snake this is human speech.

In conclusion, no, profanity, whether race-based or bathroom-based, isn’t interfering with learning. Insults and actual hostility do, but that is so scarce that its influence is negligible. “Nigga”, while having racist origins isn’t used in racist ways, and therefore isn’t denigrating and holding back African-American students. I’d argue things much more tangible than words such as,
you know, severe poverty, are having a far more significant impact, but what do I know.

Before I end this I do want to point out possible flaws in my reasoning, all of which I see as quite fair. First, I also don’t speak in AAVE. Second, I am speaking from the perspective of a student, I don’t see the same variety of class levels and people as the Albatross likely does. Third, I’ve likely gotten some facts wrong. While I’m confident in the major points of my writing I am slightly less so in the exact details, such as Anglo-Saxon using “cū” instead of another word for beef (the closest I could find was “mete-cū” (Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online) but that is “a cow raised for meat”–not a word for beef).

Despite these flaws, however, I am still confident in my logic and encourage discourse among those who are reading this. TL;DR: You can’t/shouldn’t stop language and the idea of profanity is cū scitte

Signed,

Behemoth