Is it ever acceptable to say the ‘n-word’? As you will have immediately inferred by that sentence, it’s rare to see it even spelt out in full today. It’s perhaps the only word in the English language you will never see written without asterisks in a newspaper or magazine. It is, to use that phrase once beloved of the Guardian, ‘the last taboo’.
‘Words have context, and the word “bitch” can have a positive meaning if you look at the Oxford English Dictionary,’ it was reported that Pormann told the meeting
Peter Pormann, a professor at Manchester University, was this week reminded the hard way of its undiminished power, when he was banned from campus and described as a ‘potential risk to colleagues’ for having allegedly used the word in a disciplinary meeting. The university is investigating whether Pormann’s use amounted to inappropriate, offensive and racist language.
The irony is that Professor Pormann is a classicist and philologist, whose vocation entails exploring the origins, evolution and change in the meaning of words. He is said to have used the word at a meeting to support a fellow academic who had been accused of upsetting students by using the word ‘bitch’. ‘Words have context, and the word “bitch” can have a positive meaning if you look at the Oxford English Dictionary,’ it was reported he told the meeting, citing the n-word as another example. ‘I am not saying that we should use these words but I am a philologist so words have context,’ he added.
Everybody knows this to be true. Not only do words have context – a black rapper can utter the ‘n-word’ without fear of reproach – but their usage alters over time. ‘Gay’ is an obvious example of one that has undergone transformation in living memory, and a word which still has a different meaning depending on where it’s said and by whom. By the beginning of this century, it remained a derogatory as well as a neutral term to describe a homosexual. ‘Queer’ has experienced an even more torturous adventure. Many gay people disdain it now, regarding ‘queer’ as having been co-opted by the radical trans movement.
Things that shocked our forefathers no longer have the same capacity today. When Eliza Doolittle uttered ‘Not bloody likely!’ on the first night of Pygmalion in 1914, it scandalised respectable society unused to hearing in the theatre a word that was unremarkable among the lower orders. Yet few people of any class take offence at ‘bloody’ and it’s never described as the ‘b-word’.
By the time the expression became a favourite of Alan Sillitoe in the 1950s – ‘whatever people think I am or say I am, that’s what I’m not, because they don’t know a bloody thing about me’, said Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) – bloody had lost much of its ability to startle, yet it was still not said in polite society. But other novels from that era do cause us to double-take: Our Man In Havana (also 1958) by Graham Greene has the n-word in its opening sentence.
As a man whose professional medium was words, Greene knew how their meanings shifted over time. In Brighton Rock (1938) he had used the n-word in the plural as well as the term ‘Jewess’. As J. M. Coetzee explains of that novel: ‘In the circles in which he moved, such racial epithets were acceptable currency.’ By the 1970 edition, Greene had removed both terms, replacing them respectively with ‘negroes’ and – you’ve guessed it – ‘bitches.’
Greene, one-time literary editor of The Spectator, was fully aware to the exigencies of journalism and the need not to offend your readership without good reason. People who produce newspapers still appreciate this. The Daily Telegraph on Tuesday probably made the right decision when it reproduced on its front page, with short dashes, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood telling Parliament of her experience of being called a ‘f—ing P—’.
Graham Greene had every right to amend and update his own creation. What’s more questionable is the decision made by publishers to re-write books posthumously to accord with their politics. Roald Dahl has been the most conspicuous casualty in this department. Two years ago, Puffin released rewritten editions of his children’s books with extensive changes, with the words ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’ removed from all reprints.
This trend has been blamed on today’s fear of causing offence and the emergence of a censorial, hyper-liberal ideology that has few qualms about re-writing history to accord with its worldview. Yet had these types reared on postmodern theory paid less attention to Foucault and more to Derrida – or even Saussure – they would have come to appreciate that the meaning of texts or words are never stable and forever contingent and subjective.
Today’s ideologues believe it right to cancel others for utterances that they deem unacceptable or sinful. Yet there’s no such thing as a ‘bad word’. There are only words used maliciously or malevolently in a certain place and at a certain time.
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