Use Your Words – A Rant

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On Saturday afternoon and evening we had a big family get-together at out house. The women were gathered in the kitchen preparing the food, enjoying a cold Sangria and clucking like the hens we are. We were talking about food and the subject came around to a sandwich that I ate recently at the cafe where college boy works. I mentioned that while it was good, I thought the toppings were niggardly. After I spoke, my mother looked at me and said “I wish you wouldn’t use that word.”

I said, “What word?” because I honestly couldn’t think of what word would have offended her. She said, “Niggardly. You shouldn’t use that word.”

And then my aunt said, “I would probably get fired for using that word at work.”

Then I realized why they thought I shouldn’t use it.

I said, “You have to be kidding me. It’s a valid word which has nothing to do with what you are thinking.”

My mother said, “I realize that, but it doesn’t sound nice.”

I was stunned.

I assumed everyone was familiar with the word and knew that it has nothing to do with the Latin word for the color black, from which the racial slur comes. If you don’t use the word, it mean miserly or scanty. The root is “nig,” a Scandinavian word for a stingy person.

So tell me, when did we stop using words with perfectly valid meanings because they sound like words we would rather not use?

My husband ran into the same situation at work not long ago. Speaking with a colleague he used the term “linch pin.” He used it correctly, referring to something (actually some one) that was crucial to holding its parts together. His colleague said, “You shouldn’t use that word.” When my husband asked, “What word?” his colleague said that a linch pin is the pin that was pulled when a black man was lynched.

My husband apologized for offending his colleague, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized that he had been wrong to apologize when he should have corrected. He later wrote to his colleague and explained that a linch pin has nothing to do with a lynching. His colleague apologized and thanked him for setting him straight on a cultural misinterpretation.

So back to my question, when did we stop using words because they sound like words we don’t use?

Our society does not seem to shy away from using some very inappropriate words intentionally, like most of the four-lettered words and their kin, why would we shy away from words with perfectly valid, inoffensive meanings, because they sound like “bad words?”

Maybe because we, as a society, an American culture, have ceased to learn new words? We have stopped reading challenging literature because it’s “too hard.” We have become close-minded with our vocabulary. I would say that even our media is guilty of avoiding words which challenge us. People no longer refer to their dictionary to learn the meanings of words they don’t know. They chose ignorance, maybe out of laziness, or because they prefer familiarity.

Or have we become so afraid of our neighbor that we will do anything, including being ignorant, to keep from offending him, even if the only reason he is offended is his own ignorance? And the media, again, is guilty of perpetuating the pattern, by encouraging political correctness.

Or maybe it’s that we are so afraid of offending our neighbor we don’t want to use words he doesn’t understand. Last night Doug and I watched a movie in which the young adults said, “Hey” and “What’s up?” and “I’m good” and “Yeah.” That was about it. I asked Doug if he thought people really speak like that and he replied, “Yes, I do.”

I obviously don’t know the answer to this issue, but I do think that it is an issue. And it really burns my derriere.

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