Quote: “Die, N-word. We don’t want to see you around here no more.” Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.
Figure of Speech: tabooism, a form of circumlocution. From the Tongan tabu, meaning “forbidden.”
At the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s national convention, horses drew a carriage with a pine casket. Inside the casket was the anthropomorphically embalmed word “nigger.”
Did Figaro just offend you? Forgive him; he has a reason.
The word “nigger” didn’t become a bad word in America until the nineteenth century, when it took on pejorative connotations. Derived from the Latin niger, meaning “black,” it allows Figaro to demonstrate a perfect tabooism — a word or phrase that substitutes for a forbidden word. Figaro devised the term “tabooism” himself, because circumlocution is too broad to describe the phenomenon.
A circumlocution (or periphrasis, as Figaro’s Greek homeys called it) swaps an unpleasant word or phrase with a description. (Bodily waste for doo-doo, significant other for “guy I’m shacking up with”.) A tabooism does the same thing, except that it substitutes only for words imbued with scary powers: Adonai for Yahweh, gee for Jesus, He Who Must Not Be Named for Voldemort, and the F-word for, well, you know.
Of course, one of the best ways to give a taboo more power is to ban it. By burying the N-word, the NAACP may actually turn it into one of the Figuratively Undead.
WTF?
Snappy Answer: “S’up, person of color?”
Posted: 12th, July 2007 | In: Anorak Says Comments (8) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
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November 19th, 2007 at 5:47 am
NAACP - nigger are axtually colored peopleses /kirkpatrick likes to eat up fat baby white boy dicks
October 15th, 2007 at 1:53 am
Does that mean White nigga’s are ok?
October 11th, 2007 at 1:21 am
I suspect that there was another genesis for the word, “nigger”. In the southeastern United States, the word “negro” has long been pronounced, in a wide variety of areas, as “nigra” or “nigre”. Originally this wasn’t intended to judge anyone’s character. It was simply a descriptor. Over decades and centuries this has morphed into the “nigger” and, more recently, “nigga” that we hear today.
August 17th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
A place that shows the niggers living among us for what they truly are.
Diseased, crime-ridden, sub-human vile creatures. They’re God’s little joke on humanity. Any race so pathetically stupid deserves to be laughed at.
Send teh chimps back to africa where they can enjoy their Planet of the Apes.
July 13th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
Ok there is good nigga’s and bad nigga’s the bad niggas they work for a living ~~ Now the good nigga’s are on the corner smoking crack and doing who knows what killing there self .. way to Go for passing a law on crack !!
July 12th, 2007 at 11:40 pm
Let’s hope the nigger gets to rest in peace unlike this poor despot:
In 1986, 15 years after his death, a mob of Haitians stormed the marble-tiled Duvalier vault in Port-au-Prince’s National Cemetery to ritually beat Papa Doc’s body and assure he could never rise on Judgment Day; however, they were disappointed to find the tomb empty.
As a result, the mob went after one of Duvalier’s supporters. Exhumed from his coffin in a neighboring tomb, General Gracia Jacques was beaten to ‘death’.
Hehehe, such primitives.
July 12th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
Nigger is as nigger does, they do no good for their cause with their voodoo ceremonies.
July 12th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
long ago nigger brown was a lovely warm shade of, well, brown