In 2019, Laurie Sheck came under investigation for quoting James Baldwin. She was a New York Times-contributing poet and novelist and Pulitzer Prize finalist, but she has said the most radioactive word in English, so now she was presumed racist. She’d been just one in a string, and more followed. In 2020, University of Southern California professor Greg Patton went through the same ringer for teaching students the syllables ne ga, filler words in Chinese such as our “er” and “um.”
This isn’t new. Look at the 1999 case of David Howard. According to the Washington Post, “David Howard, head of the [D.C.] Office of Public Advocate, said he used the word ‘niggardly’ in a Jan. 15 conversation about funding with two employees.” Per the Post, it quickly became rumored that Howard had used the most notorious racial slur, which sounds somewhat similar. The two words are etymologically unrelated, “niggardly” coming from a 14th-century Germanic term for “miser.” Howard resigned.
Getting even near this word engenders scandal for a reason. Modern life has softened the punch of our A, B, and even C words. N is still a proper bad word.
People have a hard time with a basic concept that I wrote about at the time of the controversy over Sheck, “a key distinction between actually employing a word’s meaning and simply referring to it or saying its syllables — the ‘use/mention distinction.’” When you quote something or talk about the letters or sounds themselves, you merely mention the words. If I said that “words have meaning,” I’d be using the word “words.” Whereas, if I said that “‘words’ has five letters in it,” you’d understand that I was mentioning the word itself, not using it.
In the latest ado, the New York Times has pushed out a career reporter, Donald McNeil Jr. Did he use the word? No. He mentioned it. On a New York Times-branded trip to Peru for teenagers, the science writer who had spent time covering Ebola in West Africa and who was up for a Pulitzer for his coverage of the coronavirus made the mistake of entering dangerous territory. He discussed with someone about whether her classmate should have been suspended over saying the word, asking if the classmate had used the word or merely mentioned it.
Flash forward to 2021, and 150 New York Times employees wrote a letter to try to reopen an investigation into him, citing their human resources training that “what matters is how an act makes the victims feel.” (Who exactly are the “victims” is unclear.) New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet had previously concluded that “it did not appear to me that his intentions were hateful or malicious.” Nevertheless, Baquet gave into the mob, now writing, “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.” Curiously, this means that you can be fired by the New York Times for mentioning which words you can be fired by the newspaper for mentioning. McNeil resigned in duress.
I had thought that the New York Times was in the words-having-meaning business. I had thought that, over there, they knew that the whole magic of language is that it allows others to decipher our intents.
