Nigger, please
Remember last year when Kramer blew his frizzy top mid-act at a heckler? In case you haven't seen the YouTube of it, Kramer gets hassled by a man of negro appearance while doing a stand up act, and Kramer lets fly with his inner Ku Klux Klan member.
As funny as that was, it set into motion a sequence of events worthy of any Seinfeld episode. Not long after, the club that he was performing in at the time placed a ban on their comedians using the word "nigger". The club fined any comedian who broke the rule, apparently Damon Wayans got fined 15 times. They should ban pink hats.
Fast forward a few months, New York City has also placed a ban on the use of the word "nigger". I didn't even know that words could be banned. How does one ban a word? Do your neighbours rat on you and the Thought Police break in through your roof? Surely there's something in someone's constitution somewhere that prevents words being banned. Germany bans all Nazi and Third Reich propaganda, yet use of the word "Nazi" itself is still allowed.
Of course, wherever America goes, Australia is sure to follow. Some nutbag wants to ban "nigger" in Australia too. I actually have a little more sympathy for this guy's position. Unlike American and comedic culture, Australian culture has no alternate use for the word "nigger". If anything, it would amount to a banning of kids in primary school trying to be Eminem (if anyone knows what the Unicode character for the backwards E in Eminem is, let me know).
You people don't need me to tell you how stupid it is to try and ban words. Even if such a ban was remotely enforceable, new words will pop up to take the banned words' place.
I can see how such a ban would come to be; who would argue against it? How do you argue against a ban on the word "nigger" without being branded as "pro-nigger"? I just know that this is going to come back and bite me in the arse in twenty years time when I apply for a gun licence, but people, I am declaring myself as "pro-nigger". I have a dream, that someday my children will march proudly in the Nigger Day parade to celebrate our lexical freedoms. It brings a tear to my eye.
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Doesn't the first amendment protect the right of free speech? Aren't the yanks usually somewhat defensive of that particular amendment? Sounds like a bit of "selective patriotism" to me.
The Spanish word "negro" originates from the Latin word "niger", meaning black. In English, "negro" or "neger" became "negar" and finally "nigger", most likely under influence of French "nègre" (also derived from the Latin "niger") So basically, if you call a black individual a nigger, you are making the stunningly perceptive statement that they appear to be black. Why would anyone get offended? Why do people get offended by simple words at all? They all have innocent enough origins. "Fuck" apparently was derived from the German "fricken" which means "to strike". So people who use it in a sentence like "I'm gonna fuck you up nigger!" Are probably being quite semantically precise (at least if they're about to hit a black guy).
P.S. Wiki tells me i was led astray by that wav file and the German reference is incorrect... but "ficken" still means to bash down (ok, as in a door, with a battering ram, but it's not that much of a stretch...)
Um, actually “schlagen” means to strike, or at least it means to hit (unless those tricksy Germans have synonyms), the etymology of “fuck” is a bit obscure. My good dictionary tells me (ME, OE?, c G ficken) so my guess is the word is common in Middle English and there is an assumption that it derives from an Old English but there is some uncertainty as to what this root is. I have no idea what ficken (my german dictionary is inadequate) means but since I'm pretty sure that c means cognate my guess it that it translates to pretty much the same thing as fuck.
In any case, banning words is spectacularly stupid. Did anybody catch the attempt by the Brits last year to ban speech that may incite hatred? Rowan Atkinson(!) addressed the House of Lords about why it was a Very Bad Idea and the Lords shot it down, those feudal hangovers are alright.
As an aside, can I get an avatar at this stage or will I have to make a new ID?
Duhhhh, click on Edit your details and upload an avatar, it's just under the picture next to the speech bubble that you type in. Also, the next release of Boredomistan will be compatible with Gravatars! Excitement!
I'm glad you all think that banning words is stupid. Disney makes up half a dozen in every movie, let's start there.
Eh.. I am proud of my yummy command Nice joke! What do you get when you play a country music song backward? You get your wife back, you get your job back, you stop drinking ...
I was exactly looking for something like that. I like to show off my flexible cousin I have read a good joke in internet ;) What goes faster than a rabbit in a field? A rabbit in a blender.
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