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On The Front Line Of Ever-Changing Lexicon

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By CHRISTIE GOLD

Special to the Tribune

Published: July 27, 2008

My student newspaper editor walks into my classroom following a science test she had been dreading for days.

"How'd it go?" I ask.

"It pretty much raped me," she says.

I cringe at the expression, which has become too common in today's teenage vernacular.

As an English teacher, I understand that language is dynamic, not static, constantly evolving from an endless influence of historical and cultural references.

Just over a century ago, a "computer" was simply a person who crunched numbers. Until the 1940s, "gay" had no homosexual context, and every year the venerable OED (Oxford English Dictionary) adds words to its pages.
Recent additions to the OED have included "girlcott" (to end the gender bias of a "boycott"), "blankie" (the colloquial children's term for "blanket"), and "emo" (just listen to a few songs by Dashboard Confessional to understand that one).

Medicine, science and technology add dozens of words to the language each year. Carbon-neutral and eco-politics are products of our newfound green awareness, and "Google" only recently became a verb.

Because I work in a high school, I am on the front line of our ever-changing lexicon.

Teenagers push the limits. It's a rite of passage, but I wonder, are there boundaries when it comes to language?

Years ago, I battled with students who proudly wore items proclaiming that "Pimpin' ain't easy" or morphed the National Basketball Association logo into "NPA," the "National Pimp Association." The term offended my feminist sensibilities.

But since then, pimp became a familiar verb, no longer just associated with the prostitution of women. A boy might pimp his car, his computer or his iPod. Anything that can be accessorized can be pimped.

But profanity seems to have gained widespread acceptance among all age groups, especially young people. Students drop the "f-bomb" enough to grant most idle hallway chatter an R rating. Are they to blame? Their music and movies freely make use of the word to the point they don't find it shocking.

The punishment for using the f-word in class as an interjection is minimal; using it as a directive toward a peer or teacher has more severe consequences. Thank goodness for that.

I'm hardly a prude when it comes to language; nevertheless, some words remain taboo in my communication.

I barely made it through first minutes of last year's award-winning film "Atonement" because of the use of one particular word that makes nearly every woman I know gasp. True, the unintended consequences of the protagonist's use of the word form the tragic nature of the plot, but I don't know any female who is condones use of the "c-word."

As a culture, we argue endlessly about the "n-word." It's the intent behind any expression that creates meaning. Gloria Naylor addressed this in a 1986 New York Times column. She recalled that the word had been used freely in her black household while she was growing up, but it wasn't until a white boy in third grade directed the word at her that she understood its racist context.

I understand Naylor's point. I don't believe many people of my race use that word without racial undertones. I wonder, why would any American - black or white - want to use a word so closely tied to a painful period from our past?

Of course, Seinfeld's stingy, soup-ladling character changed "Nazi" to a humorous jab at anyone who is too stringent.

Should there be some untouched language frontier? Or should we deconstruct words for what they are - mere symbols for conveying our thoughts and emotions?

"Words, words, words," says Shakespeare's Hamlet, in response to Polonius, who asks, "What do you read, my lord?"

Polonius wants to know the meaning of the words the tortured hero reads, but Hamlet suggests that words are empty and useless.

When my student says that her test "raped" her, when a young boy "pimps" his car and when a rap star refers to his friends as his "niggas," the words are not completely void of meaning, though their meanings may lack malicious intent.

I defer to another cultural context three-and-a-half centuries after Shakespeare, one from the 1970s iconic super-trio the Bee Gees: "You think that I don't even mean a single word I say, that it's only words."

Words are all we have.

Christie Gold, who lives in Wesley Chapel, teaches English and journalism at Freedom High School in Tampa.

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