How common is it to hear a person say, I myself do not object to this style of composition, or this or that expression, but, to such and such classes of people it will appear mean or ludicrous! This mode of criticism, so destructive of all sound unadulterated judgment, is almost universal: let the Reader then abide, independently, by his own feelings, and, if he finds himself affected, let him suffer such conjectures to interfere with his pleasure.
— William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Appendix” (1850)

Many moons ago, I wrote a paper about the essay I’ve quoted from above. I don’t know how I angered the English-department gods, but as a result of my apparent failure to sacrifice a used paperback copy of Derrida to the appropriate deity, I found myself marooned in a caffeine performance-testing lab which the course catalog had had the nerve to mislabel “ENG 377: History Of Linguistic Thought,” and after a semester of holding our eyelids open with the thumb and forefinger of each hand, literally, while the professor went on a magic carpet ride of irrelevant blathering about texts that we hadn’t read because they only existed in the original Sanskrit in a glass case in Libya, and that only served to prove his point, which he had never identified in the first place and from which he’d strayed so far as to require an airplane ticket and the aid of several burly Sherpas to return to it, and while the only non-English-major in the room buried himself head and shoulders in the professor’s ass with repeated digressions on the subject of the Kabbalah and the “numerical poesy” therein, my classmates and I greeted our parole from ENG 377: We Just Turned Forty Over Here (also known as “ENG 377: One Man Bends Time,” “ENG 377: How Else Can Two Hours’ Worth Of Wednesday Afternoon Last A Lifetime,” and “ENG 377: The Course Number Indicates How Many Years Each Session Will Seem To Last, How Many Cups Of Coffee We Have Consumed In Order To Maintain Cardiac Function, And How Many Million Dollars We Would Pay A Member Of The Gambino Crime Family To Kill Us Right Now”) with an exhausted relief akin to that of train-wreck survivors. But the final paper, which constituted our entire grade for the course, presented a serious problem, given that we’d expended most of our intellectual energy on trying not to expire from deep-tissue boredom rather than on the texts under discussion. A group of people who wouldn’t have given each other the time of day otherwise, we spent two weeks on the phone to each other and huddled together over coffee in the student center, wondering how we could possibly wring thirty pages out of material that the professor had not explained to us or even permitted us to discuss, preferring as he did to wax monotonous about the glory days of Middle French instead.

So, in the end, I punted. I pulled Wordsworth’s “Preface” off the shelf, read it a few dozen more times, formulated a thesis, and ran with it, and then the damnedest thing happened: I started to enjoy myself. I really started to get into it. Wordsworth’s basic premise in the “Preface” is that poetry needed to return to a more genuine retelling of emotion, and that poets need to remember that they don’t write only for other poets but for the layperson reader as well. With me so far? Well, somewhere in there, my Foucault-addled brain jumped onto a parallel track, using a short sidebar of Wordsworth’s on the concept of “translating” emotion into verse as a jumping-off point for my own thesis, which addressed the philosophical arguments surrounding the true nature of language. Still with me? The long and short of it: I tried to prove that none of us can really understand fully what anyone else “is saying,” because while we all use language to communicate, and while some of us may use the same language to communicate, language only serves as a rough approximation of emotion and intent — a voice-recognition program using real voices — and while we’ve got no choice but to use language unless we’d prefer to “talk” using interpretive dance, it’s by its very nature an inexact medium. Okay, stay on me, people, because the air’s about to get reeeeally thin. I wound up my citation-heavy discourse with a couple of paragraphs on how language’s beauty resides in its ambiguity, and the frustrations of that ambiguity provide a microcosmic example of Wordsworth’s concept of the sublime.

Hello? Anyone still there? Oh, hi, Dad. Yeah, four years of that? That’s what you paid for. Dad?

I worked for two weeks on that damn paper. I brought it everywhere with me and read parts of it to my friends. I started every conversation with, “Okay, check it out. You know how Eskimos have all those words for ‘snow’ but we just say ‘snow’?” I wandered into the WaWa Market at three in the morning; a classmate stood in the aisle, proofreading his own paper and frowning while chowing Sun Chips straight from the bag, and as I passed him on my way to the cheese puffs, he stopped me: “Do you think I can get away with using ‘contiguate’ as a word?” An hour later, we still stood there, snacking, and discussing whether or not our professor would infer that my classmate intended a Miltonian critique of existing terminology when he didn’t cite Milton in his paper. I killed myself on that goddamn thing, and I slung a hectare’s worth of bullshit around in my college papers, but I didn’t pad that one at all; I really thought I had something. It’s the best academic writing I ever did, and it got a C+ and a single penciled comment, to wit: “In order to explicate Wordsworth’s work, it helps to first read and understand the text.” Oh. I see. But thank you for splitting an infinitive while insulting me and turfing my chances of departmental honors all at the same time, in PENCIL, you insufferable old GOAT. I mean, seriously — a sniffy comment like that, and I don’t even get a Bic? The hell?

I reread the “Preface” today before sitting down to write this essay, and while I still object to the Eberhard-Faber treatment, I think I deserved the C+ after all. I got too excited about the theoretical implications and didn’t ground them properly in what the text actually gave me to work with; Wordsworth doesn’t really concern himself with origin of language as much as with its use (well, not in the “Preface,” anyway). Still, it’s a question that I’d asked myself before, and I’ve asked myself many times since — what do words mean? Not their definitions — we can find those easily enough in a dictionary — but their meaning in terms of their function? What does it mean to “use words”? What power do words have? How much? Why?

As a writer, I think about the power of words a lot, and not even consciously most of the time. Most of the time, it’s a pretty prosaic (so to speak) process — whether to use “smirk” or “sneer” to describe a line delivery in one of my recaps; how to convey what annoyed me about Chocolat with the most precision; which way to spell a belching noise so that the reader understands that it’s a belch and not someone saying the word “braaaaaap” really loudly, and that it’s not a beer belch (that’s more of a “rrrrreeeuuucck”) or a food belch (closer to “errrupp”) or an empty-stomach belch (“aarrrck?”), but one of those mid-afternoon, do-I-want-a-snack-ah-fuck-it-I’ll-just-shotgun-this-diet-cola belches that kind of come over a person out of nowhere. “Brrraaaaaaap!” Yes, I realize that it’s deeply sad of me to obsess over the correct way of onomatopoeizing a burp, but I want to get it right. I have a certain thing, a certain image in mind, and I don’t want to get close; I want to get there. It’s for this reason that writing about smells drives me batty. I have a sharp nose, and I can nail a scent at fifty paces, but English only has a few synonyms for the noun “smell” in the first place, and all the descriptors for the sense of smell involve taste, and in order to put across exactly what it is that I smell when I say that I smell snow in the air — well, it’s very difficult. And other people who “can smell snow” will know what I mean, but do they smell the same thing that I smell? If I asked them, “What do you smell? Tell me how you smell snow,” would they say the same thing that I do — that it’s like what you smell when you clean the lint trap, but without the detergent-y part, and also more acrid and with a slight whiff of dirty hair?

I’ve had the question on my mind during the last couple of weeks because of the flap over Eminem appearing at the Grammys. The debate about whether or not he should perform, given some of his lyrics, seemed to come from three different directions: 1) he uses the derogatory terms “fag” and “les,” and therefore he’s a homophobe; 2) okay, maybe he’s a homophobe, but it’s just a lyric, and he’s one of the most talented rappers working; and 3) he’s a punk, but this country has the First Amendment for a reason and gay people in America have bigger battles to fight than Eminem’s skinny ass, so bring it on. Well, let’s break it down from a language-philosophy standpoint. I haven’t heard enough Eminem and don’t know enough about rap and hip-hop to speak to the guy’s relative talent, so I can’t really address #2. But, from what I understand, a big part of rap for male rappers is selling their manliness. Rap is aggressively hetero, so Eminem throwing a term like “fag” around is sui generis. It’s unpleasant, and it’s outright offensive to many, but it’s also part of hip-hop’s framework. Not to take the example to an overly academic extreme, but, like a villanelle or a sonnet, a rap song operates under certain strictures, and as much as the repetition and doubling of a villanelle test a poet’s mettle with rhyme and meter, it’s how the rapper performs within the format that determines his skill. It’s not the beats, or the rapper’s voice; it’s how he makes the standard of the genre his own, and that’s true of any musical form (or any art form, for that matter). Keeping in mind, then, that rap often tends toward the crudely heterosexual, and that it has to rhyme, and fast, I don’t know that we can tag Eminem as a homophobe. Again, it’s of the environment. Not to spend too much time apologizing for the guy — I personally think the whole “fag/les” lyric is distasteful in a puerile, sixth-grade bike-racks kind of way, and I don’t see why he couldn’t have substituted another word that rhymed with “les.” Maybe he did it by design, to garner himself attention. Maybe he really does hate gays and lesbians as much as his lyrics imply. But where does that leave us with him? On to #3.

The First Amendment gets tricky. I used to get into arguments about the First Amendment with Ernie all the time, particularly about the Klan. Ernie took the position that European countries would never permit the Klan to rally, to distribute literature, or even to exist, and that the US shouldn’t either because it implies a passive acceptance of hate and hate crimes. I took the position that the US hadn’t presided over, or turned a deliberately blind eye to, the extermination of millions of people during a holocaust taking place on their own soil, and while the Klan can and should bite me, rescinding the right of the Klan to do its thing will just drive it underground and make its hate more poisonous by extension, and furthermore, once we as a nation step onto that slippery slope, all sorts of speech gets banned, and we can’t take that step or the prudes of the world will start burning Catcher In The Rye again. Please don’t write to me all “the Vichy government had no choice” and “the Klan is responsible for thousands of deaths, that’s a Holocaust in its own right,” because I know that. I’ve vastly oversimplified here, because we don’t have all day. The Klan is not a good bunch of folks. Racism is not going to buy the world a Coke and sing in harmony. We all understand that. Unfortunately, Klansmen have the right to their opinions. The First Amendment says so. I will stand up for a Klansman’s right to hate black people, and to say so, because the First Amendment protects all of us, even bigoted freakshows.

But.

Words have power. Words have the power to bring about action. A child growing up in a racist household will learn, from listening to her parents talk, that black people suck. She will see her parents act in ways that reinforce the impression that black people suck. She will hear the N word. She will probably use it herself. She will grow up and become an adult and go out into the world and act on what she has learned. Sure, she may do no active harm. She may not find herself in a position to discriminate against a black person; she may not raise a hand or even her voice to a black person in hate. But what if she does? What if hearing black people referred to as animals and sub-humans her whole life makes her think that she can do those things? What if she attends some sort of white-power rally and a speaker there encourages her to harm black people — to beat them up, to run them over, to spit on them? When do we say, “Okay, free speech is one thing, but this is getting dangerous”? Should we say that? Can we draw a line, and if so, where? I don’t want speech restricted; as I said before, it sets a dangerous precedent, and I don’t think it would do much good anyway (or, at least, not enough to outweigh the harm). But I don’t think we can shrug and say, “It’s just a word,” either. It isn’t always “just a word.” Like “bitch.” Just a word, right? They say it on network television. A bitch is a female dog. “To bitch” is a verb meaning “to complain.” And my friends call me “bitch” when I snag the last unbroken potato chip. And then there’s that guy who stopped me on the street one time and asked me to walk with him, and when I ignored him, he stepped on the front of my skirt so I couldn’t get away and grabbed my arms and hissed into my face, “You’re a fucking bitch.” Not just a word that time. A threat, more like. An indictment. It’s the same with “faggot.” It’s the same with “nigger.” I hate to type those words. I hate that MS Word doesn’t underline them in red and suggest something else. But that’s what I mean. They have power. They have power over me, and they don’t even talk about me. I can’t imagine how it must feel to have those words snarled in my face. “Bitch” doesn’t come close to that, and I could feel the hate in every drop of that man’s spittle. I almost started crying.

So, I don’t know. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me” just isn’t true. I’d take about a thousand sticks over “I don’t love you anymore,” I’ll tell you what, and I’m not African-American, but if I were, I daresay I’d take a damn shower of kindling over hearing “fuck you, nigger” even one time in my life, over knowing that somebody thought so little of me that they’d say something that nasty out loud, to my face, and not feel any shame over it. “Fucking faggot” — yeah, very sixth-grade. And then — Matthew Shepard. I don’t know that we can separate bad speech from bad acts, but I think we have to keep trying, and here’s why. My grandmother had an expression: “Every tear you don’t shed becomes a stone in your heart.” I look at hate speech, and even at “political incorrectness,” the same way. Let Eminem call gay people “fags.” Let the Klan print up badly spelled leaflets about how much white folks rule. Let’s see it. Let’s talk about it. Let’s get it out there. I remember thinking in the heyday of political correctness that talking about what to call the differently abled or Afro-Americans or alternative-lifestyle practitioners didn’t address the real problem, that calling a person “Asian-American” instead of “Oriental” didn’t do anything except on the surface. Now I think that we’ve got to start somewhere. I’ll give Eminem this: whatever he thinks about gays and lesbians, he got people talking about gays and lesbians, and that’s good. That helps. He got people thinking about what they say, about what they mean when they say things, about whether they call gay men “fags” in private but make nice to the “fags” at the office, about African-Americans appropriating the word “nigger” in order to claim its power for themselves instead of against themselves, about getting prejudices and hate out into the light so we can lean in close and get a good look, and that helps. That has to help. I don’t approve of hate speech. It disgusts me. Bigotry — spoken or acted, overt or veiled — disgusts me. It’s easy for me to say as a straight white girl, but I want that ugly shit out where I can see it. I want to keep an eye on it. I want to know it’s there, because knowing it’s there gives me the power back. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

Let’s hear it now before it turns to stone.

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