Words that need to be disarmed

15/02/2005

First, a warning. This column necessarily contains some offensive words, for reasons that will become clear. Anyone who finds such words intolerable under any circumstances should look away now, writes Fintan O'Toole

In the mid-1990s in a girls' secondary school in working-class Dublin, a class was rehearsing for a production of the musical Grease. When the girls came to a passage of dialogue that included the word "bastard", the girls were deeply shocked. They didn't want to use the expression and asked the teacher who was directing the show if they could substitute a less offensive term. What, she asked, would they suggest? They thought for a while and came up with what they agreed was a much more acceptable word: "bollix".

Their objection, in other words, was not to the use of crude language in the context of a drama, but to a very particular word. They knew that "bastard" wasn't just bad language, but language that carried a particular freight of belittlement and stigmatisation.

Spool forward six or seven years to an English class in the same school. They were studying a set text for the Leaving Cert: Shakespeare's King Lear. Much of the action of the play is underpinned by the contrast between the two sons of the Earl of Gloucester - the noble, pure hearted and "legitimate" Edgar, and his evil, conniving half-brother, Edmond the Bastard. The teacher had a problem, though. The girls literally did not understand the word "bastard". The term had been successfully - and spontaneously - winnowed out of their inherited vocabulary. And in the course of that gradual process, it had also, for them, lost the power to wound. When the teacher explained what "bastard" meant, they were tickled pink. "That means I'm a bastard," laughed one. "Me too." "And me." Within their world, something small but wonderful had taken place over time. A curse had been lifted.

In the 1960s the pioneering stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce had imagined that something like this could happen. He sometimes started his shows by counting aloud the number of "niggers", "kikes" , "spics" , "guineas" , "greaseballs" , and "micks" in the audience. Just as the howls of outrage were about to drown him out, he would explain himself: "The point? That the word's suppression gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness." If, for example, the word "nigger" were used again and again "till nigger didn't mean anything any more, till nigger lost its meaning - you'd never make any four-year-old nigger cry when he came home from school". Lenny Bruce was wrong, though.

Words don't lose their power through repetition. They lose their viciousness and violence by not being used. Words are like muscles: if you don't exercise them, they become weak. The girls in that Dublin school, and the community they come from, instinctively understood this. Over the course of a decade, they put the word "bastard" into a deep-freeze of disuse, so that by the time it emerged again it had become weak, harmless, even funny.

This is what should have happened among supposedly more sophisticated people too. After the 1960s, when groups who had been at the receiving end of stigmatising language gradually acquired the confidence to answer back, an innocent use of words such as "bastard" , "nigger", "Taig", "schizo", "cripple" , "tinker" or "poof" became impossible. Bigots everywhere hated this development, of course, but there was little they could do about it.

And then came a godsend: the notion of political correctness. Though actually a concept limited to the lunatic fringe of American academia, PC was immensely important to the bigots. It was the magic wand that transformed crude stupidity into an apparently smart and cheeky attitude. Simply put the words "I know this is not politically correct but . . ." in front of any expression of old-style chauvinistic intolerance, and you were no longer a cowardly bully. You had become a courageous truth-teller. The very success of this strategy, though, makes those who use it smug and careless. Sooner or later the "not PC" mask slips and the bare face of bigotry reveals itself.

None of this has much to do with free speech. The right to speak and write freely is, like every other right, dependent on one simple condition: that you don't use it in such a way that you take away the freedom of others to enjoy it too.

The whole point of crude name-calling, of course, is to shut people up, to deprive people of the right to be heard by labelling them in advance as members of a contemptible group. Put simply, you don't start a free debate by kicking your opponent in the stomach and then complaining that her cries of pain are incoherent howls.

What the sensitivity to language does have to do with is something that right-wingers always claim to value: civility. What they call political correctness is actually just the extension to groups of the basic courtesy that a mannerly person affords to an individual.

The irony is that people labelled as uncivilised often turn out to have far better manners than those who do the labelling.

? The Irish Times