confusing, but it's  changing daily
Oh, when a word 
was a word, and we knew its meanings!

It has always been known that words are important not only to express and understand ideas, concepts and abstractions, but also to control individuals and nations. For instance, race is a social construct used primarily for political purposes; James Baldwin wrote of the idea of becoming White--clumping all European decedents in America into one grouping and calling them White, as a distinct race of people. 

Baldwin saw that definitional action as a defining moment in European American history. It gave European Americans a broad identity they could rally around. The clumping of all Europeans into the one category called White changed the American lexicon and created a new people---Americans have always been about reinventing themselves. The new lexicon did what the schools could not do: it harmonized a diverse European people who spoke many tongues and had different cultures, into White Americans.

Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, was once asked the following question by a young mother who said she was tired of the degradation of her child through America's negative lexicon: "Bobby, I'm so tired of my children being degraded by being called nigger; what can we do about this?" His response to that mother was this: "Nigger, Nigger, Nigger, Nigger.... I want him to hear it until it doesn't hurt anymore, then we will overcome it."

While that response and Seale's meaning are deeper than this article intends to discuss, what it showed was that he understood the importance of words and attempted to take the sting out of Nigger (the N-word, as we delicately refer to it today). The I'm Black and Proud revolution among African Americans was in part about the use of a lexicon of liberation.

But are we liberated when we allow others to coin a term that is perceived as negative and that term holds sway over us? Aren't we really liberated when we do not regard the coined terms of others but take those terms and turn them totally around? Bobby Seale tried to take the sting out of nigger by using a very masculine method of relieving hurt or embarrassment--numbing the wound. Young black rappers have gone a step further and taken that term, with slight modifications, and are using it as a badge of youth and rebellion. Gloria Naylor affirms that young, urban Bblacks and rappers have taken nigger and transformed it.

So transformed is the term that even the spelling, and certainly the pronunciation, is different. In America, young Asian Americans, Latinos, and urban whites call themselves nigga, also, which is the other spelling and pronunciation of nigger. Hence, a term that was once negative is now used as a term that reflects rebellion of our young.

But it seems as if the older generation, the supposedly more sophisticated generation, is delicately attempting to keep the potency of nigger by making it a special word so hideous that they refuse to pronounce it. Instead, they call it the N-word, and whisper its two syllables as if it is something dark and deep. Can someone create a word so powerful that it cannot be breathed in open air?

Former Special Counsel Kenneth Starr is noted in part for having advanced oral sex as not sex at all at the dinner table and promoting a free, open-ended discussion among children of all ages into our modern lexicon. Since Monica Lewinsky is still around in prominent roles, we still know that oral sex is not sex at all. We learned, along with America's children, that sex is not sex, unless one genital touches another. If a non-genital part of the body touches the genital part of the body, there will be no sex involved. OK, got that straight? America's children needed to know this?

The computer age brought the Y2K Bug, which wasn't really a bug at all, and the problems that term suggested never showed up. And then came the presidency and the presidential election of 2000 and Al Gore, George Bush, and the US Supreme Court enhanced our lexicon in ways we never needed it enhanced.

Then, the great State of Florida also brought us the Cuban Americans and the Elian Gonzalez crisis. We were confused about what constituted holding a child hostage versus what constituted saving a child from a fate worse than death--going back to his father in Cuba. We learned that the state of Florida construes the law and events the way Cuban Americans do.

And then again it was the great State of Florida. This time they decided who would be president. So Florida, more in our lexicon than its small population and importance should permit, raised a number of new and old terms: Chads--hanging, pregnant, dimpled, pimpled; We was robbed; Bushwhacked; and The court crouched its decision in legalistic language....

If we thought that was confusing, along comes the World Trade Center, which created a language culture unto itself: Osoma bin Laden, the Arabic and Afghanistan names, the War on Terrorism, 911, etc. This is a new and evolving lexicon we have to get to know and grow as it grows. And it's growing.

These terms and expressions have become a part of our everyday language, and since George Bush is president, he has created and is creating new ones daily. His father was one for the incomplete sentence, and he is an extension of his father, but he seems to favor mispronounced words. Columnist Molly Ivins calls him a shrub, not a bush, showing that he is not up to the stature of his father. But whether up to the stature or not, he has changed men's way of seeing a bush and the world.

A bush to men has always been a pleasant and an amorous term, that is, if the world were not upside down. And since it is, the bush word may not be to a man's delight--we know, for many such San Franciscan men, it is not, so we may just abandon the term altogether. And since oral sex is not sex at all--we don't quite know what to call it. We're confused about all of these new and strange words and terms. Why not return to a lexicon that allows a bush to be a bush, and sex to be sex, so we can all know the difference?

And in Iraq, the Bush Administration said that the war was over, but soldiers, people who fight wars, are still dying in warlike conditions. And those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that is why US soldiers were sent there, well we said they were there in mass quantities. We know they are there because we said they were there. We don understand what we are saying today.

Lament though we may, the language is changing and will change as new events and situations come onto the scene to restructure our way of viewing and talking about this world that is upside down. []
Gibbs staff and Jones

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