Forum / Forbidden Words

  • -5.thumb
    RW Spryszak
    Oct 26, 09:50pm

    I want to get people's take on this, and I'm willing to be open and honest about it. If that openness hurts your feelings I apologize for that. But that's not going to stop me.

    I fully understand why words like "nigger" and "faggot" and such are offensive. To call this out on people is both vile and disgusting. I would never in all my life use these words to label anyone, nor will I ever. They are, for me, a signature of a low mental capacity. They are the residue of the vicious and endemic bigotry and prejudice that built this country and made it the sometimes sick place it is today.

    But for the life of me when I read dialog that is supposed to be depicting something open and raw and the speaker says "you lousy n_____" in just that way, I kind of get the willies.

    There is a distinct difference in using this word in a way meant to marginalize or otherwise belittle or insult someone, but - in my mind - quite another thing altogether when used in a legitimate art form meant to depict just how vile the practice is.

    Are we to the point where there truly are things we may not even write, say or relate in the context of legitimate writing?

    Please give your thoughts. It's making me crazy.

  • 0001_pabst_blue_ribbon_time.thumb
    Dolemite
    Oct 26, 10:01pm

    Me too. I have a story, published, where THE CHARACTER should say ...

    but doesn't

    'cause I (not being Connery O'Flannel) am too afraid...

  • Fictionaut.thumb
    W.F. Lantry
    Oct 26, 10:41pm

    "Are we to the point where there truly are things we may not even write, say or relate in the context of legitimate writing?"

    Yes. And not only that: we always have been. Case in point: I was teaching Contemporary American Poetry at an HBCU. Came time to do Lowell. What's my favorite Lowell poem? Colloquy in Black Rock. "And I, the stunned machine of your devotion..."

    But there was simply no way. I can think of a hundred other examples, and I know you can as well. Try pouring through Pound, for instance. There's nothing new about this. Look what happened to Ovid. These days, nobody gets banished to the Romania, so I'm not sure we should complain. Why should it make us crazy?

    Thanks,

    Bill

  • -5.thumb
    RW Spryszak
    Oct 26, 10:55pm

    The crazy comes from the cognitive dissonance it seems to create. We know why we don't like these words - and we recoil when they're used simply for shallow shock value as well. But they exist in real life.

    I'm thinking of a Lenny Bruce routine where he starts running an auction using all the derogatory names we have for any ethnic group we can think of. His point was that by doing this he was taking the power away from these words and, in the bit, it worked.

    But we still run into difficulty playing that back. Posting it in places. Turning people on to it.

    It makes me crazy because it is a form of censorship that has no reason to it. And also because I don't want to offend anyone, but by the same token there's the art as mirror thing...

  • 0001_pabst_blue_ribbon_time.thumb
    Dolemite
    Oct 26, 11:12pm

    ...so I used "monkey," which is more offensive/less true.

    Thanks,

    Sam

  • -5.thumb
    RW Spryszak
    Oct 26, 11:14pm

    meh.

  • 0001_pabst_blue_ribbon_time.thumb
    Dolemite
    Oct 26, 11:56pm

    ...and it was an artistic failure on my part, as my character, a 70+-year-old southern-backwoods-white-trash woman, would have used the "right" word.

  • Author_photo.thumb
    James Lloyd Davis
    Oct 27, 12:58am

    RW,

    The social construct that existed when Lenny Bruce did that routine you speak of no longer exists in the open, such that our culture would seem to have advanced to some degree, save among the neo-Nazi subculture and in quiet places where more subdued people of like mind to the skinheads gather to celebrate their mostly silent roots in 'Aryan pride.'

    A pox on that crowd anyway.

    A great fan of Bruce, I thought that particular riff you mentioned, which ended in an auctioneer's rapid-fire naming of one racial slur after another was a stroke of genius when it was explained that... when he explained that if we say the words often enough, we render them meaningless, take the pain away, the bite, the sting of them.

    In the latter days of his career, Bruce sometimes forgot to make that explanation, presumed people understood his intent and got more than a few walkouts because of it.

    We should understand that if we use these words today in a similar, literary context... even to indict racism and decry the use of these words, we should be certain that our audience understands what we mean. Our intent should be clear. Better yet... avoid them. Use the artful dodge, metaphor, or simply alter the intent to physical expression.

    I've seen enormous changes through nearly six decades from a time when these words, these sexual and racial slurs were part of a widely used and everyday vocabulary, not only in the South, but elsewhere in America.

    Maybe it's a good thing that we feel uneasy today when we hear them. Maybe it's only the product of a period that overlaps one epoch's societal norms from another. A vestigial shame.

    Thoughtful selection of words may overcome the indulgence of some sense of or need for realism as justification. God knows, I love the harsh light of realism in my literature, but I tend to avoid those words like the freaking plague they are, if for no other reason than I am painfully familiar with the cruelty that bred them.

  • -5.thumb
    RW Spryszak
    Oct 27, 01:46am

    And a thoughtful, rational response to be sure, thanks James.

    I wish I could explain, in my own heart and head, how bothered I became when you said "Better yet... avoid them."

    As I close in on 60 years on this miserable planet myself I find myself going the other way.

    Obviously Lenny's intent to take the power out of these kinds of words didn't work yet.

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