Tuesday, May 01, 2007

yonflammable

I was truly impressed by the NAACP’s plan to bury the N word. There are many offensive N words and I suggest we also bury them, removing any chance of confusion, insult or misunderstanding. Certainly we’ve done nazi to death, too.

Probably many of you remember the political aide who lost his job for calling the budget “niggardly.” There’s danger in N- words. We would do right to get rid of niggling, and Nigella Lawson, too, or at least to persuade them to change and stop making us uncomfortable.

I think the fairest route is to strip all N- words of their N- and move them elsewhere in the dictionary. Best would be to redistribute the N- words among the letters that are under-represented, namely Q, X, Y and Z. Q has just 7 pages in my Merriam-Webster. Y and Z have 5 each, and X has just 2, most of which were made up by science fiction writers.

I'm more comfortable with zuclear threat than its predecessor. And a quisance sounds kind of pleasant. Everything with the non- prefix will now carry the more musical yon-, keeping any chance of offence far far away.

9 comments:

michi said...

ha!

ot to mention ightmares and itpicking and erds.

your word verification doesn't contain any n's - have you bribed it? ifty.

m

Liz said...

ice one, Sarah.

no 'n's in my word verification either!

Liz

Unknown said...
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Rachel Mallino said...

uts!

SarahJane said...

often the "death" of a word comes from overuse, not from putting it in a closet. but this is very un-pc and most of us would not want to play along in this case.

Ash said...

What about the whole country of Niger? And the Niger River? And Nigeria?

SarahJane said...

watch your mouth, ash.

Ms Peach said...

Have you read ELLA MINNOW PEA, A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable by Mark Dunn?

Silly and scary at the same time.

m. peach
(_ot a _ectori_e).

SarahJane said...

intrigued - will have a look at that. cheers

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