Hektore

I've had some cool teachers in my life - the kind who could joke with you, give and take a little abuse (all in good fun), actually teach and still manage to always be in control of the class. Now, I got to thinking about the types of abuse they throw around, one of them (pertinent to myself being of the visually impaired persuasion) is four-eyes. Now, I've never really been upset with someone calling me 'four-eyes'. I wear glasses, I don't have any control over it, it's just biology. I can, however, understand how it would bother some people. But, if a teacher called another student four-eyes in a manner that could only be construed as 'joking', nobody would really care. If that same teacher dropped an N-Bomb though jokingly...well I don't think I need to lay it out for you.

So, I was wondering, why do we bandwagon around the offensiveness of ethnic slurs, particularly the word 'nigger'?

I actually had like a 10 minute debate with myself whether or not to write it out anywhere or just post it as 'the n-word'. Which is what I want to look at, why is that so strongly ingrained in my head. I'm a white person and as such I shouldn't, under any circumstances, let the word pass my lips even to discuss it. I don't understand this, I mean even for the sake of discussion, I'm not calling anyone a nigger, ever. I wouldn't do that. I would call someone four-eyes, jokingly, though. It certainly isn't outside the realm of logical possibility to use, not just nigger but any ethnic slur, jokingly. It seems like with this one class of words it isn't possible to joke with them in actuality. Why not? I can't see any reason.

This led me to think about why we don't say certain words, what about them makes them 'unspeakable'. The only thing I can come up with is the injuriousness of the word. But, how do we measure that, or decide where the lines are. For example, the characteristic that you're insulting seems to matter most. Four eyes is less offensive than camel jockey - so it isn't on biology, or more appropriately things people cannot control about themselves. Not only that, it seems that most of us would agree some racial slurs are worse than others (see: gringo vs. wetback), at least in how they make us feel, if not intellectually. Someone wants to call me a gringo (they have in fact, in Mexico at that), I don't give a shit.

Maybe that's the key, it's all in how offended the receiver is? I don't buy that, because it's entirely possible for say, an Italian with glasses to be more offended by four-eyes than wop. But the former would be better tolerated than the latter by the rest of us, even if that isn't the case for the individual. Maybe it's about the past use of the word? For example, nigger has been used to inflict more damage over the course of history (at least in America) therefore it's the most despised here. I don't see why that is important either, the idea that a word being used more times to insult someone makes the word somehow, more insulting makes no sense to me.

It seems somehow that we've all managed to agree with each other that this is the way things are. To quote Douglas Adams: "...it’s just one of those things that crept into being and once that loop gets going it’s very, very powerful." I'd like to question why that is though, TFPers. Why is it, that we ring-fence around the idea the ethnic slurs are so much more offensive and despicable that other sorts of slurs?

__________________
The advantage law is the best law in rugby, because it lets you ignore all the others for the good of the game.