Vocabulary Issues

Vanity Fair: vanityfair.comWolcott-- "Fox Newsroom Leak Like Sieves" : "...I also find myself in rare concord with Elizabeth Hasselbeck, token Republican Twinkie on that lettuce bed of insurrection, The View. I'm tired of the N-word, I'm tired of the phrase "the N-word," it's an ugly-sounding word that does immense more harm than comedy or comradely good; the debate over its shock value, over whether it's self-asserting or self-hating, is one of those unresolved, racially-frictive bores, given the flux and flex of the context in which it's considered OK and the subjective sliding scale of acceptability depending on whose mouth it's coming out of. That Jesse Jackson dropped this familiar nugget in the Fox studio during his insta-classic mumbly "nuts off" monologue seems to me worse than Imus's "nappy ho" comment because Jackson assumes sonorous airs of eminence and should know better. Imus can be a jerk, but he doesn't drop his bucket into the deep well of piety from which Jackson honey-coats his words when he knows the mike is on. His use of the n-word is as indefensible as any rapper's, Whoopie Goldberg shouldn't be slinging around the air either, and the easiest thing to do is to anethematize the word across the board. Just drop it already, an unofficial universal ban that would make its utterance as crass and offensive as spitting on the sidewalk instead of solemnizing it into controversy that "we as a people must come to terms with" when there are so many other topics more deserving of blathering to death. It's time to "move on" and explore new and different ways we can get on each other's nerves in the post-racial America Time and Newsweek have laid out so nicely for us on the picnic grass..."