Opinion: New Yorkers, bite thy tongues

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It must be wonderful to live in a paradise like New York City, a place so sublimely free of deadly dangers and life-threatening perils that its city government can devote itself to such niceties as which words its residents ought not to use.

First the city voted to ban the Noun that Begins with N – the derogatory term for blacks that has been pushed out of public speech but shoved its way into rap music. A local NAACP branch even gave it a funeral, coffin and all, as a show of hope that ugliness can be buried with a word that is freighted with ugliness.

The city ban has not been accompanied by any enforcement measures – police, for example, cannot slap a strip of duct tape across the offending mouth and effect an arrest. But so successful has this legislation presumably been that New York City Councilwoman Darlene Mealy, of Brooklyn, now wants to add the word ‘bitch’ to the no-no list.

Evidently the ‘n-word’ has been so thoroughly expunged from the Big Apple vocabulary that Ms. Mealy wants to build upon that, and …

What? It hasn’t? Informed sources are telling me that neither the legislation nor the symbolic funeral has managed to spell the d-e-a-t-h of the ‘n-word.’ Perhaps Ms. Mealy hopes that misery will love company and that two banned words will make an exponentially bigger impact than one.

If any of the players in this would turn off the iPod and read a little Harry Potter this summer, they’d learn at least as well as Thomas Jefferson or Al Sharpton or George Orwell could say it: fearing a word gives it power, and banning it makes it more powerful still.

Look at how the word ‘queer’ has evolved from an insult – which it still is in some people’s minds – to a word that some gays embrace defiantly, and use as both a shield and a weapon, to make its original ugliness boomerang back on the person who hurled it so viciously in the first place.

Sure, it’s difficult. Even scary. And as a technique it might not work the first time or the thousandth. But maybe … eventually … come on, try it. Say it along with me: Voldemort Voldemort Voldemort.