Okay so apparently I’ve gone and agreed to some deal wherein I match every blog post made by a couple of my with my own blog post. I’m not really sure about the rules, and I couldn’t actually remember I had agreed to it until this morning when Anna’s blog featured a new post reminding me. I was originally going to do another “around town” post and had some pictures ready until I realised there was something else I’d been thinking about recently.
I like Twitter, I’m logged into it whenever I’m at home, and love following lots of different people with whom I wouldn’t otherwise be able to communicate. One of the people I follow is Jeph Jacques the author and artist for my favourite webcomic Questionable Content. I like to follow Jeph on twitter as well as most of the characters from his webcomic (yes he’s created twitter accounts for them and they post to each other and stuff, it’s totally awesome). But that isn’t what this post is about. Jeph a couple of days ago posted a few tweets about an incident that started over at Penny Arcade with one of their comics. I only heard about the rage from Jeph’s tweets about it but apparently it was all because PA had used the word “faggot” in a comic in a derogatory context (no they weren’t talking about bundles of sticks).
Jeph went on to say how he didn’t consider the way they used the word to be offensive, but understood that some people thought that usage of the word was intrinsically offensive. Okay, with you so far Jeph. Then he tweeted “Honestly, I think the PA strip is meant to show how awful and idiotic it is to call ANYONE that word. But I still get why it bothered people”. And that’s where I start to disagree. I use the word faggot in a derogatory sense all the time both in text (usually shorted to “fgt” in IRC or WoW) and spoken. I don’t think it is “awful and idiotic” to call people that word, atleast not the way I use it. I think language is more complex than that. Language evolves and changes and the meanings of words and how they’re used changes. The way I (and some of my other friends) have come to use the word a lot is not really malicious at all, but it is still used as an insult. It’s mostly ironic, used purely as an insult and completely disassociated from any connection the word has from homosexuals or bundles of sticks, and I seriously think it’s fine. Queer is another word which I think used to be an insult towards homosexuals but is now used all the time (and I don’t even think it’s taboo any more, unlike nigger, which is a word I still hesitate to use eventhough it appears in heaps and heaps of rap music). Maybe it’s one of those things where it’s okay for the insulted party to use the word, but not anyone else. Fuck that I’m not going to play by those rules, that’s descrimination too. I think sometimes the insulted parties in those cases like to argue that the word has taken on a different meaning to the original (derogatory) meaning rendering it fine for use. Well then it should be fine for everyone. This taboo word business is bullshit, you’re always going to offend someone with what you do, no matter what it is. I get offended with all the biblebashers (collective term for people of any faith who come around looking to convert - bible here is not inherently Christian, “holy book” doesn’t provide the same alliteration and doesn’t have the same ring to it) who come around asking me to be saved and using words which are inherently filled with the judgements of their biblebash-y values - no one is exempt from causing offense. To communicate effectively you cannot help but cause offense sometimes. There was a a great debate about whether it’s fine to cause offense in communication I saw last year on ABC Fora but I can’t find it because the search function on their website is crap :P
When and why was faggot ever used as a derogatory term for homosexuals anyway? What is the origin of the insultory meaning? Surely the bundles of sticks meaning came first? So then it became corrupted into a derogatory term? My point is that language changes and there are no hard and fast rules about how you should use words.
One of the reasons I’m blogging about this is that I’m completely sick of all the political correctness that gets attached to everything these days and all the really vague and fluffy language that goes along with trying not to offend anyone. You can’t communicate effectively like that. Have you ever heard Tony Abbott speak? It’s disgraceful, he never actually says anything (I’m not kidding) and he especially never answers the question. Sure, you might argue that there are other factors going on here like Abbott trying not to say anything that might amount to less people voting for him, or maybe trying not to give away whatever non-existant policies/positions they take to the government to latch onto and criticise. But those are just variations on censoring his own language for political (correctness) purposes. Here’s a really good talk about modern fluffy language I saw recently on ABC Fora (such a good site). All this fluffy language people think is communicating is really just obfuscation.
The title of this post from a WoW guild on US-Blackrock called <sup fresh our turn baby>. I have no idea what this means, but it contains the word fresh so I thought I’d borrow it to indicate my first new blog post in a while :P
I couldn’t work it out at the time, but it finally hit me. This post kinda reminded me of Orwell’s “1984″ where people’s speech was regulated so that they would only use certain kinds of words. I read the book when I was too young to really understand it, but I have had it mentioned to me that the idea behind it was that people’s thinking can be influenced by the way they speak. The ‘Newspeak’ in the book involved things like replacing antonyms with “negated words”, e.g. ‘bad’ became ‘ungood’. So in a way, it’s like ‘bad’ was removed from the language, the idea being that if ‘bad’ didn’t exist as a word, it would be harder for someone to conceptualise what it meant. It’s like if you lived in a world where the colour blue didn’t exist, and someone came along and told you about it, you might think about it as some abstract concept, but you’d never really form that concept into anything concrete.
I am going somewhere with this. =P
So in the opposite sense, if common usage of words like ‘faggot’ and ‘nigger’ are seen as derogatory, then in people’s minds (consciously or subconsciously), gay people and black people will be seen as being lesser. ‘Nigger’ brings with it so many conotations other than skin colour, and so even if someone were to refer to another person as nigger, even if it were just a reference to skin colour, it would be difficult to suppress the initial attachment of the other stereotypical qualities.
That’s why I think people get all worked up over it (although doing it to the point of being over-politically correct is just as bad, IMO), because it’s hard to change people’s views if people will continue to use such words in a derogatory way. Sure, language will evolve and ‘faggot’ may come to mean someone who is noob-like (ie. gets ass-raped in every game they play), but because this evolution will have stemmed from a gay origin, I think it’ll be hard to remove the relationship entirely.
Humans are not designed to hurt each other. While it’s commonly discussed that humans are naturally violent, this is only true when a human life is threatened. The instinctual drive of every normal human (not sociopaths) is to maintain the survival of the self and the survival of the human race. It’s why we are driven to breed.
However, it does become necessary to hurt, maim and kill other humans from time to time. In order to circumvent our main instincts, we create, in our minds, a belief that the person or people we are fighting are not human, or at the very least, subhuman. Lesser than us. (in some cases, greater than, see: tall poppy syndrome) It enables us to do horrific things to other humans, because they are the enemy, because they are not us. We are normal, and they are not.
In extreme cases, this manifests in unimaginable brutality towards the other. We don’t just kill, we torture them. (see: Holocaust, public belief towards Jews, homosexuals, gypsys, anyone really) Even the “good” guys do it as well, see the old Superman comic “Slap a Jap”, the caricatures of Japanese people during WW2, the caricatures of African Americans during…well, any time in American history.
In lesser cases, this circumvention causes us to call people derogatory names such as “nigger” or “faggot”. We, as Anna said, are creating stereotypes and connotations that people who we define as different, people who we do not understand, can be labelled with. While we may not outwardly show it, ultimately, we see those people as lesser or subhuman, so we can circumvent our natural instinct to not kill them, if we had to. (part of the self/other belief is that the other is always a threat to the self)
-GP
PS: Hey Olek, I’m apparently part of this one to one blog thing.