Author and podcaster John McWhorter talks to The Globe about the joys of cursing
The pandemic left many unable to concentrate enough to read a book, let alone write one. But Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter somehow managed to pen not one, but two new titles., out now, is a gleeful foray into top taboos, tracing the history and culture of profanity, while, due out this fall and serialized on Substack, is a penetrating critique of the ascendant anti-racist ideology.
That word no longer qualifies as profanity that any anthropologist would recognize. When we think of what our bad words are, there’s a certain collection of words that comes immediately to mind. But really the status of words like that changes over the years. We are experiencing fuck doing that right now. The truth is, I probably say it a good five or six times a day. And I am really a bookish, starchy, reserved person. I say it so much because people like me use it that way.
Next thing you know, people are calling women that. If you are a woman, then unfortunately in many quarters, it’s thought that that means you’re weak. If so, you can understand how it would jump to being used for gay men – to imply that a gay man is somehow weaker than quote-unquote a real man. What starts as something that you throw on the fire becomes a reference for a man who sleeps with other men. Which is a bizarre series of transformations. Language does that.
I can recall any number of conversations in the ’90s and in the aughts, and even into the teens, where a white person said the word in order to set us upon the topic that we were going to discuss, and that wasn’t considered offensive. That was considered just human ability to distinguish between one thing and another. I would like to go back to that.
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