🔒 Obedience and the R-Word Mind Virus

My initial problem was that I didn’t know whether it would be more distracting to actually use the word or to avoid it. Which tactic would detract from my point more than serve it? 

Ultimately I don’t think it will matter too much. You’re going to see it in a bunch of screenshots and you can already see it inside your head simply because I’m talking about it. How about this: I won’t type it out any more times than is necessary, but by way of a trigger warning or content advisory notice or however best to say it: You are going to see this word.

 You may think this is a strange topic of discussion just a couple of weeks after the Elon Musk did a sieg heil at the presidential inauguration of a man who has expressed fondness for Hitler. Why would I spend any time at all on the R-word? Well, you actually just answered your own question. The fact of it being seen as no big deal is the point.

 First, let’s talk a bit about slurs, and censorship, and self-censorship.

 There are a lot of ways in which we talk about or around words without saying them. In a practical sense, this is absurd. There are a number of methods of euphemism that lie on a scale of obliqueness: From “The (first letter)-Word” to replacing most of the letters with asterisks, to replacing just one of the letters with an asterisk, or if you really want to make damn sure everyone knows what you’re alluding to, replacing one or some of the letters with stylised versions of that same letter.

 To be explicit, what is really the difference between Retard and Ret@rd?

 The paradox is that you’re trying to hide the word for courtesy sake while making it as absolutely clear as possible which word you’re referring to, for communication sake. There is no way to do both of these things.

 The fact is that true censorship isn’t  the reason we do this. It’s not a practical consideration. It’s a courtesy consideration. It’s something much closer to why you cover your mouth when you yawn or say “excuse me” when you belch.

 Ideally we wouldn’t even need to allude to words that cause harm or distress, but we inhabit a world in which offensive things exist and people use them, and we need to be able to describe that world without amplifying its harms more than absolutely necessary. If you’re talking about Pewdiepie having one of his notorious heated gamer moments and you’re telling someone about what he did, it’s just preferential from a human decency perspective to say “Pewds yelled the N-word” than to match him syllable-for-syllable even if the mental image it evokes is identical.

 I still think it’s absurd to use some letter-replacement trick if you are directly calling somebody something. I mean, the ideal scenario is you take your dear gran’s advice to heart and say nothing, but if you absolutely must, then I think you should fuck around with your whole chest before getting to the business of finding out.

 That said can we agree that there’s something so absolutely fucking childish about this:

Matthew Yglesias, everyone’s favourite both-sides-have-a-point guy, Substack’s most popular “Stay Calm and Keep to the Centre” pundit, is attempting a funny, here. Look, I see what he’s going for, he’s making fun of the people who call other people that word by saying “actually, it is you who that word describes, and now that you’ve made it okay to say it, I can use it against you!”

 I don’t hate Matt Yglesias. He’s a technically skilled writer whose opinions I find roughly 60% “fair enough I guess” and only 10% “dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” But a comedian, he ain’t. If you view this through the comedy lens that I’m charitably applying to it, it’s not really skewering the type of people who type this word in full. What he’s doing is mocking a certain type of person for one behaviour by using the fact that he kind of agrees with them about a different issue.

 The replies to his tweet from his fans should help clarify.

Noah Smith of the cleverly titled Noahpinion blog is another generally inoffensive centrist freelancer who I know next to nothing about but he doesn’t seem to be a piece of shit. He doesn’t seem to have any huge controversies hanging over his head. I don’t think I would have ever heard of him if not for the fact that he’s often mentioned in the same breath as Yglesias, and part of my research for this piece was to investigate the usage of this word by this specific type of person, and well…

 This is Noah Smith’s favourite word. He uses this word like he breathes. Noun, adjective… I’m sure he’d find a way to use it as an adverb or a conjunction or a pronoun if he could. He yells it instead of “achoo” when he sneezes.

Here’s the thing: Most cases of generally otherwise inoffensive people using this word only tend to spring up over the past couple of years. It’s not even a Trump era thing, it’s a second round Trump era thing. The types of people who enthusiastically voted Trump three times for the most part have never cared about open slurring on the internet (I wager they’re a lot more careful about it offline though) but the way open season has been declared on it lately is new.

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