No. 616: Don’t Snigger at the Perennially Offended

Poor Stephanie Bell. Unwittingly she ran afoul of the Perennially Offended (PO’s) when she used the word “niggardly” in her fourth-grade classroom. It’ll be scant comfort for her, but she isn’t the first person, not even the first teacher, to set off this niggling little tripwire.

David Howard, a white aide to Washington Mayor Anthony A. Williams, said the sounds-like-the-N-word in 1999, and the mayor asked for his resignation. He was later reinstated. Also in 1999, a black student at the University of Wisconsin accused her professor, Standish Henning, of racial insensitivity for describing a character in The Canterbury Tales as “niggardly,” brushing aside Henning’s explanation that the word was valid. Henning further infuriated her the following class session by discussing the meaning of language.

It is clear from these instances that Americans aren’t aware enough of all the potentially offensive terms out there. Our language is too diverse. The PO’s are listening to every word we say, and they’re apparently hard of hearing, so it’s best to avoid words that even sound like offensive words. Whether the term is offensive or simply similar to an offensive term is of no consequence — offending someone is the vice of the day, and once you explode that mine, no matter your intentions, you must bear the scars. Ask Stephanie Bell.

The problem for those of us who, like Bell, aren’t accustomed to walking the verbal minefield is this: how does one know what not to say? We are facing a dilemma previously imagined only in fiction — how are speakers of a shrinking language supposed to forget words? In short, we face the paradox of having to remember an ever-growing list of forbidden words we mustn’t know.

It was a dilemma Winston Smith, the writer-protagonist in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, faced with the imposition of Newspeak by his government, Ingsoc. A conversation Winston had with Syme, the Ingsoc lexicographer in charge of “a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,” illustrated the difficulty.

“You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,” Syme told him. “Even when you write it you’re still thinking in Oldspeak.” Why that was a problem, of course, was that Newspeak sought “to narrow the range of thought,” to “make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

But words are hard to eliminate, as Winston and even Syme demonstrated. Syme’s work was meticulously destroying adjectives, all the while stubbornly clinging to them in conversation. Syme ironically called his work “fascinating,” a word choice that signaled to Winston that Syme himself would one day be vaporized.

At least Ingsoc had an official dictionary of acceptable terms. No one has yet compiled a list of acceptable terms remaining in our language. But as Syme said, “The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.” At this stage in our sensitivity progression, perhaps we could help the perfection of our language by compiling terms that are primed to become unacceptable.

So it is in the interest of furthering diversity by limiting discourse — and not, I stress, of being gratuitously offensive — that I offer this partial list of words that might be offensive to the PO’s:
• niggling
• negligee
• negligent
• neglect
• negate
• nagger
• knickers
• nickel
• neckerchief
• snigger
• snicker
• query
• quarry
• choir
• flag
• fad
• fang
• fragment
• homeowner
• hominy
• homogenize
• dike
• thespian
• lexicon
• Lebanese
• batch
• pitch
• kite
• kick
• speak
• speck
• engine
• wobble

This is only a start. More submissions are sorely needed, for the sake of all our feelings. Nevertheless, now that you’ve learned these words not to say, you must unlearn them. Ignorance is strength. Remembrance is forgetting. Or, in Syme’s words: “Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”