Niggardly: A PC Nightmare
Wall Street Journal, January 29, 1999
What a Niggling Offense! Oops, We Mean . . .
By Richard Dooling, a lawyer and the author of "Blue Streak: Swearing, Free Speech, and Sexual Harassment" (Random House, 1996) and "Brain Storm" (Random House, 1998).
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when the worst thing you could say began with F, Lenny Bruce was often arrested and charged with obscenity by prosecutors who usually couldn't utter the word themselves in open court. Instead, government lawyers used inventive euphemisms to make their case, like the prosecutor in Chicago, in 1963, who argued in court: "I don't think I have to tell you the term, I think that you recall it as a word that started with F and ended with a K and sounded like truck."
All of which prompted one observer to opine that the word duck is 75% obscene.
Liberals who once reveled in Lenny Bruce and in George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words" routine now have their own lists of unspeakables, and the F-word is so popular it's downright proper. But the left is even more zealous than the right when it comes to censorship and punishment, particularly for any white person who dares to use the N-word.
The N-word is tabooed so thick, even words that sound like it apparently are too much for our modern sensibilities. In the 1950s, public officials weren't forced to resign for saying "puck" or "fire truck," but witness recent events in Washington, D.C. The nation's capital is in the throes of a compulsory vocabulary lesson, which is turning out to have considerably more sting than any spelling bee. The word in question? Niggardly.
On Jan. 15, after a meeting with Washington's new mayor, Anthony A. Williams, David Howard, head of the District's Office of Public Advocate, reported to two other aides that money would be tight at the constituent services office. "I will have to be niggardly with this fund," he said, "because it's not going to be a lot of money."
When Mr. Howard saw the looks on the faces of the two men to whom he was speaking at the time, he immediately apologized for using a word he had learned as a high school student studying for his SAT. But it was too late. One of the aides, Marshal Brown, a veteran government worker who is black, stormed out of Mr. Howard's office before Mr. Howard could explain himself. The complaints came rolling in, Mr. Howard offered his resignation, and Mayor Williams accepted it.
The word niggardly is etymologically unrelated to ******, which derives from Latin, Spanish and Portuguese words for "black." Niggardly comes to us from Middle English and perhaps Scandinavia, and means "miserly" or "stingy." Niggardly has no associations with race or color. A search of the Web sites of every major newspaper in the country turned up many recent articles using niggardly, even at the obsessively PC Los Angeles Times.
Not that any of that matters. What matters is that Washington is two-thirds black, and its new mayor (like the fictional Atlanta mayor in Tom Wolfe's new novel, "A Man in Full") is under attack for "not being black enough." If we were to go by the book, perhaps the new mayor needs to be denigrated (meaning "blackened"), but then well-meaning folks often admonish us not to denigrate black people.
Mayor Williams came under fire for accepting Mr. Howard's resignation--not by angry linguists, but by gay activists. For Mr. Howard is openly homosexual. Mr. Williams, however, defended his decision, saying that to use a word like niggardly in the District of Columbia's current political climate is like getting "caught smoking in a refinery that resulted in an explosion."
These language imbroglios are so ridiculous they would be the stuff of a "Simpsons" episode or a "Saturday Night Live" skit. But they have consequences in the politicization of reference works. Word scholars may want to hold on to those old dictionaries and thesauri, because newer editions will surely be bowdlerized to accommodate our new hair-trigger capacities for taking offense.
The same factions who submitted petitions to Merriam-Webster last year demanding that it remove the N-word and other epithets from its dictionaries will now presumably add niggardly, and perhaps niggling, to their list, simply because they don't like the sound of these words. The gay activists who called on Merriam-Webster to remove offensive synonyms for homosexual from its thesauri have met with apparent success, so it probably won't be long before Merriam-Webster agrees to clean up entries that offend other groups as well.
Expressions ranging from a nip in the air to a chink in the armor will be removed because they might be uttered in the wrong context. What about whopper or spick-and-span or a finger in the dike?
Or what if you were standing in a deli next to a redheaded Jewish man, and you happen to mention that you don't like orange juice?
The unspoken theory is that if we eliminate bad words it will eventually be impossible for a person to speak or think ill of someone else. The modern view of human beings is that people are neither good nor bad, they're equal. These social goals are already embodied in the evolution of thesauri.
In Roget's fourth edition (1977), the synonyms for bad person outnumber the synonyms for good person by almost three to one. Synonyms for vice outnumber synonyms for virtue more than two to one. When we get to the fifth edition (1992), good person and bad person don't even appear in the index, presumably because such classifications are too judgmental. What if the bad person we want to call a bald-faced liar was committing perjury only to protect his family?
Speaking of President Clinton, his attack on Iraq last month led to an incident that proves words speak much louder than anything so trivial as actions. During Operation Desert Fox, Pentagon officials saw an Associated Press photo that showed a 2,000-pound laser-guided bomb on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise in the Persian Gulf. The bomb bore the inscription: "Here's a Ramadan present from Chad Rickenberg."
The Clinton administration promptly issued a statement on the importance of politically correct bombings and equal-opportunity mass destruction: "Department of Defense officials were distressed to learn of thoughtless graffiti mentioning the holy month of Ramadan written on a piece of U.S. ordnance during Operation Desert Fox in Iraq," said chief Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon. "Religious intolerance is an anathema to Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen and to all Americans who cherish the right to worship freely. The United States deeply respects Islam."
As the Savannah (Ga.) Morning News editorialized: "Imagine the nerve of some sailor insulting Moslems right before they're bombed, maimed and killed." Ah well, it's easier to implement a bombing speech code than to remove a dictator. And anyway, it's not as if Saddam is a bad person.
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