The A-Word

by shamanic

That would be "annoyed". Ruben Navarrette Jr. takes a swipe at a number of media types for using what he describes as the "w-word". The only problem I had as a reader of the piece is that I wasn't sure what word he was referring to until he actually wrote it out (the word is "wetback", which apparently Bill O'Reilly said on his show, to the scorn of many in media, who Navarrette criticizes for repeating the term. As I just did.)

Navarrette also has this sentence in his piece: "And what my gay friends call the 'f-word.'"

In my ultra (urban) gay circle, we use the word 'faggot' with all measure of irony fully intact. My favorite construction is actually "fagotron" or "fagotronic", but I guess that's neither here nor there.

Navarrette also explains that the "w-word" indicates that people swam across a river to be here, but I had always assumed it was a slander on the type of labor that immigrant workers were supposed to do: outdoor, physical work that left their shirts soaks from the effort. I may be wrong about this, but the slur "redneck" is the one I grew up with most in the modern south, and necks become red from doing backbreaking labor in the sun. "Faggot", as I understand it, was the bundle of sticks lit beneath gay men to torture and kill them in earlier eras. As a taunt, it encompasses a brutality only known in religious violence, which of course that form of execution was.

All of this is a sidetrack to my annoyance though, which is rooted in the dismemberment of words. How many are going to become a letter-hyphen-word, until all meaning is removed? And doesn't creating this class of words actually reduce the value of the one (largely) unspeakable word in our lexicon, remade into the "n-word"? As a white southerner, I'm attached to the notion that this construction is a unique reminder of a place, a time, and a social order steeped in such injustice and horror that it is dangerous to directly conjure it in language. The construction of the term "the n-word" is itself a potent linguistic note on our sorry history and difficult racial present, one that "the f-word" and "the w-word" don't even approach.