Female NPR Host:  Every age has its dirty words.  They usually involve sexual and scatological meanings.  But now they are apt to involve race and ethnicity or sexual preference.  Our linguist Jeff Nunberg has these thoughts on the changing notion of taboo.  

Jeff Nunberg:  It was the sort of story about political correctness that the media loved to report.  A white employee at the University of Virginia Medical Center was talking to coworkers about the names of football teams, and he remarked that having a team named the Redskins was as derogatory to Indians as having a team called Niggers would be to blacks.  

His use of "nigger" was enough to provoke some of the staff to organize a protest.  The university president called the employees' remark "unfortunate and offensive."  And Julian Bond, who is now a History professor at the University of Virginia, demanded that the employee apologize, and that he be required to take sensitivity training.  

It's hard to find any word to describe that reaction, short of "obtuse."  After all, the employee had only mentioned the word nigger as an example of an unacceptable racial epithet.  But there was also something disingenuous about the way that critics ridiculed the episode as "another example of political correctness run amok," as if it revealed the fatuousness of all our concern about offending ethnic sensibilities.  The fact is that nowadays a word like nigger has acquired a kind of incantatory power that even the most benign intentions can't entirely bleach away.  

[1:31]

I was struck by that one day last spring when I was talking to an undergraduate Linguistics class about the origins and use of racial epithets.  That's clearly as neutral and clinical a context as anybody can imagine.  But when I pronounced the word "nigger," one black student raised his eyebrows.  "You sure you're not getting any secret satisfaction out of being able to say that word?"  I told him, maybe a little defensively, that I was mentioning the word, not using it.  

But I had felt a complicated twinge when I said it.  I recalled making an effort to say it as offhandedly as possible, without betraying my unease with a telltale pause or change in pitch.  It was the same feeling that I have when I have to mentioned a four-letter word in the course of making some recondite point about English syllable structure.  I know that linguists have a dispensation to say those words, but it doesn't entre dispel the sense of transgression.  

[2:23]

That's what it means to say that a word like nigger is taboo.  Whatever the context, the very syllables become an incantation that invokes all the ugly violence of racial hatred, in exactly the same way that dirty words are contaminated by the things they refer to, a taint that bleeds through any quotation marks you put around them.  

Of course, for us, taboo is a secular and ironic word.  When we talk about taboo subjects or taboo words, it's usually to make light of other people's uptight squeamishness.  But in the Melanesian and Polynesian cultures we originally borrowed the word from, it signified what Sir James Frazer described in The Golden Bough as "contagious magic":  "If a dead body was taboo, then so was the man whose shadow fell on it, and the utensils he touched, and the meals he prepared with him, and so was his name.  Each of them became dangerous to other people and to itself."  

And that's exactly the sense of taboo that attaches to what we call dirty words--the sense that a name can be contaminated by the thing it's connected to.  It's no different from the magic beliefs of the Polynesians, except that, when we do it, we don't describe it as superstition.  

Taboos are always a guide to the deepest fears and inhibitions of a culture.  We've forgotten the sacral power references to God's wounds or God's blood could conjure up in Shakespeare's time.  And we find it amusing to imagine a horror that Henry James would have felt, if he could have seen an episode of The Sopranos.  But then, James would be puzzled at our age's almost physical aversion to ethnic epithets, to the point that some people are uncomfortable when people have to read Huckleberry Finn or a Flannery O'Connor short-story.  Not that James was the sort of person who would have used a word like nigger in his own speech, but he would have avoided it because it was vulgar, not because it was obscene.  

[4:10]

The shift is implicit in the way that people talk about the N-word nowadays.  That's the same coy formula that parents have always adopted so that they could upbraid their children for using forbidden language without actually having to pronounce the words themselves.  And that may have been part of what was behind that recent story about the Louisiana second-grader who was sent home for using a bad word, when he told a classmate that his mother was gay.  

If those reports are true, of course, the teacher was more stupefyingly clueless than the people who got worked up by the remark made by that unfortunate University of Virginia employee.  To believe that gay is a bad word is not only misinformed; it implies that homosexuality might be so abhorrent, that its very name could be impure, so that it becomes something literally unspeakable.  

But as demented as that misapprehension is, I suspect it wouldn't have occurred to that teacher 30 years ago, before the notion of "magical taboo" was extended to words like these.  That's the trouble with sacralizing these epithets--it risks turning attitudes like racism and homophobia into guilty pleasures.  Taboos always confirm the dark power of the ideas they suppress.  Describe nigger as "the N-word" doesn't just mark it as something we're not supposed to say in public; it also ensures that it will have an intriguingly transgressive force when we say it in private.  

Not that anyone should ever mention the word for any reason without a sense of its power, but it doesn't deserve the awe that a taboo implies.  Let it lie in the sun to rot.  

Female NPR Host:  Jeff Nunberg is a linguist at Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information, and he's the author of The Way We Talk Now.