The Return of Magic Words

The electronic media landscape has re-enchanted our engagement with language

I. Intro: Taboo Words and Noa-Names

Back when I was in university, I remember a linguistics professor telling my Linguistic Features of American English class (or whatever it was called) that in a recent scientific poll, the respondents were asked what they considered the most offensive word to be. According to the results, the majority said “fuck.” But no one in my class bought it. Even in the mid-to-late-00s, it was just simply implausible. Some women insisted that “cunt” must be more offensive, though they just called it “the C-word.” But this was rebuffed when the other students pointed out that the word probably isn’t so offensive in some areas, and it certainly isn’t in other countries such as Australia. I sat silently while the students debated among themselves, but the general consensus was that there are definitely worse words than fuck. And yet curiously, no one actually said what the most offensive word could possibly be. It was the “pink elephant in the room,” and no one dared say it; they didn’t even allude to it. But I’m sure most were thinking it. It was nigger, with the R specifically sounded out. The “gamer word,” as the kids say nowadays.

Now, when I sat there thinking about this poll, it occurred to me that the respondents weren’t so different from my classmates here. They were asked, “What word is the most offensive?” without being given a list of words to choose from, so they probably just said the word that’s most offensive to say without actually offending anybody. The true most offensive word they simply wouldn’t say because they felt wrong even doing so in such a context. This is actually how taboo words function; one sees the word as having such an immense, mysterious power that it stops being used except in the urgent situations where it would be appropriate. There’s no reason to think that saying it analytically in a scientific context would constitute one such valid usage for a truly taboo word.

If a taboo word can never be used at all, however, then it will die eventually. I’ll give an historical example. In Latin, the word for “bear” is ursus. In Greek, it’s arktos. In French, ours. In Welsh, arth. All of these words originate from the proto-Indo-European root *rtko, and that’s why they’re similar. In English, it’s bear, which isn’t similar, and in fact it originally meant “brown.” And this is because some ancient Germanic tribes just stopped using the original word altogether. They probably decided it’s only appropriate to say when absolutely necessary, but then it eventually fell out completely (though we now use derivations of the original Indo-European root in the boys’ names Arthur and Orson). “Bear” was originally a noa-name, i.e. a word used to avoid saying the true name of something and incurring bad luck, or shame, or whatever. Such words are quite common in primitive cultures. It’s why some Australian aboriginal tribes have a sign language. And even well into the English renaissance, people would refer to Shakespeare’s Macbeth as “the Scottish play” for this reason. Noa-names can supplant a taboo word altogether, because in order for a taboo word to remain in the public consciousness, it has to be used, despite its forbiddenness. So there’s a paradoxical quality to taboo words.

II. Failed Attempts at Demystification

Words can become magical, and indeed there is always an ever-present magic to how they function: the spoken word is a vibration that occupies a sliver of time, and with it we conjure up an unrelated image or sensation in the mind of whoever hears us. But despite this amazing mysticism, for a good while there was a strong fashion among scientifically-minded types, people who really believed in enlightenment principles, to try and negate the magic of certain words. In 1972, George Carlin first did his bit on “the seven words you can’t say on TV.” In the early 90s, the academic field of “Queer Theory” was created, even though “queer” had been a slur for a good while. The homosexual advice columnist Dan Savage around the same time would encourage his writers to begin each letter with the salutation, “Hey, faggot” — a gesture unthinkable today. The idea of these provocations was that people would take the power out of bad words. Everyone with a college degree was in the spirit of smashing idols, it seemed. “Iconoclast” was a big compliment you’d give to someone who seemed independent-minded, though it doesn’t seem to be used as often now. Even as late as 2003, Randall Kennedy released the book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, and it would be there in book stores on display. He wasn’t trying to “take the power out” of the word necessarily, as his thinking was a bit more subtle than that, but the provocative title can be seen as a vestige from this earlier attempt to defang taboo language.

Yet since then, things have changed. Magic words have come back, and college professors, journalists, career entertainers, and other humanities-educated people have actively worked to restore the magical status to a whole bunch of bad words. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have tracked these changes in their book The Coddling of the American Mind, which shows how college leftists have increasingly interpreted speech as a potential form of harm or even violence. I do not need to go over all of the ways in which the political left has made certain words into magical charms. But a few will suffice. Take, for instance, the fact that some publisher reprinted Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ as The N-Word Of The Narcissus, or that Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn has been decanted of the word entirely in new editions. On social media now, there are words you can type (including even ‘mongoloid’!) that will automatically “quarantine” your posts, making sure no one can engage with them beyond viewing them through a direct link, even if you put the word in quotations. Transsexual activists often speak of ‘deadnaming,’ i.e. naming a transsexual by their former name from their sex assigned at birth, as an insult of almost mystical proportions. And there are often incredibly popular posts being produced on social media that will say some variation of, “If you’re white, you may never, ever say the N-word. Not even when you’re singing along with a song that has it. Not even when you’re alone.” People will jokingly respond with absurd questions like, “What if I think about the word and vocalize it internally? Is that OK?” But I suspect these questions sincerely occur to people occasionally. According to everyone’s new best friend, ChatGPT, it’s never, ever permissible to say a racial slur, even in a hypothetical situation in which doing so would save millions of people from a nuclear blast.

III. The Digital Effect on Magic Words

I believe this shift has happened mostly because of the internet. There always had been people who wanted to alter language for political reasons – recall the 1970s attempt from radical feminists to change “women” into “womxn.” And political correctness started making some headway at this sort of thing in the 1990s when “political correctness” first became a term. But these sorts of politically correct types were like the Lollards, or the followers of Jan Hus before the invention of the printing press. In order for Protestantism to happen, it needed the appropriate technology to express itself. So it goes for today’s official state-sanctioned morality, which (despite claims to the contrary) is alive and well. The so-called Great Awokening needed the internet to evolve into its current magical, irrational form. The electronic age merely nudged it, but the internet gave it a big shove.

Let’s consider why this is. During the age of print, people got their ideas from the written word, and print denuded the word of all the features that accompany direct, person-to-person communication: tone of voice, facial expression, the ability to gesture or point at things, and so on. Vernacular spelling and grammar both became standardized (Latin already was, of course). Books could reach large amounts of people, and the communication would be rigid and depersonalized. Only through literary style could a “voice” be implied. These conditions allowed for, yet never really created, the total demystification of language. Such demystification didn’t happen because the conditions of print media never interfered with organized religion, which keeps magic alive by its very design (like e.g. with sacraments such as baptism and the eucharist). But this standardization of language did succeed in bringing large amounts of people together by giving them a set of common books from which they could draw their wisdom and codes of honor. We call this nationalism. And though it is often associated now with jingoism and bigotry, nationalism was a form of large-scale collectivism and was probably the closest we will ever get to unifying humanity.

The internet, on the other hand, has de-standardized language. Its rapidity, coupled with the great variation in expression it offers, creates a communicative environment that thrives on peculiarity. One’s syntax, use of jargon/neologisms, visual memes, spelling, semantic associations (like redefining words altogether), etc. will vary from group to group. And this is to say nothing of voice, facial expression, and physiognomy, which now can reach vast distances non-corporeally. The internet, as many have observed, is an engine for tribalism, which is essentially a micro-nationalism. The manner of communication is one of the chief ways in which one micro-nation distinguishes itself from others.

IV. Decline of Structuralism Among Intellectuals

Now, although the age of print theoretically allowed for the demystification of language, it never quite happened. As I said earlier, religion was still a huge aspect of public life, and your “reading public” during the enlightenment was for the most part the bourgeoisie. The world became less magic even among the lower classes following the enlightenment, but bad words, taboo words, still existed. Yet when religion finally began to decline in influence, intellectuals could finally start to place value on the demystification of language. In the early 20^th century, philosophy took a “linguistic turn,” as Richard Rorty described it, in which words were being subject to close analytic scrutiny more than ever before. In the 1970s – interestingly around the time when electronic media had become firmly entrenched within public discourse and everyone had a TV – the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure began to explode in popularity among the humanities departments of American universities. Saussure’s linguistic theory was known as structuralism, and (roughly speaking) it was based on the idea that language is an arbitrary, convention-bound system made up of phonemes that only attain meaning by way of their differentiation from other phonemes. Saussure and those influenced by him (including those who were trying to go beyond his theory; we call them post-structuralists) correspond to the obsession with trying to take the power out of bad words that we see in the 70s with George Carlin all the way through the 90s.

But the micro-nationalism that the electronic world engendered got right in the way of this grand dream of demystifying language. For participants in digital tribes, language is immensely powerful, and the supposed arbitrariness of words that we encounter in the philosophy of language doesn’t really matter at all. It isn’t even “false,” just irrelevant. If your tribe is the lens through which you view the world around you, and your tribe communicates in a differentiated fashion, constantly mixing and remixing the building blocks of its language, then everything becomes context-specific and densely idiomatic. You can create shibboleths. You can create taboo words. You can create all kinds of new formulaic utterances and written incantations tailored to specific purposes, not just logically propositional ones, and all of this is important because your identity is at stake. It’s magic! And moreover, if you can impose this magical sensibility upon the rest of society, compelling them to go along with your understanding the world, entitling you to use words that others cannot, then you have won some kind of victory in the communicative landscape.

From this perspective, all this Saussurean structuralist stuff looks pretty quaint. The post-structuralists, for their part, couldn’t overcome the logic of the electronic era, either. They recognized that things were changing, but in order to adequately convey just what it was, they needed to overcome the semiotic limitations that they imposed upon themselves. Jacques Derrida is a particularly telling example of what I’m describing: he correctly understood that we were no longer living in the age of “the book,” but he also decided to announce that the root of all language is in “writing,” which of course he defined counter-intuitively to make the claim plausible. In his view, although no one can ever process the precise meaning behind anything, because all signs endlessly defer to some other sign, we should all just sit back and enjoy the process anyhow and keep “reading” and “writing” forever, because that’s just how things go, or something.

Simply put, these are ideas that can only appeal to people deeply mired in the Gutenberg universe. You read a book, you express some puzzlement over what it says, and then you decide you’ll solve the problem by looking up a reference, finding another book on your shelf, and then reading that one. And then, as it turns out, there’s an unanswered question there! So you go and find another book. And so on. Derrida seduced people who live that lifestyle. He and the other Saussureans, including Baudrillard, and even Roland Barthes should be understood chiefly as late-Gutenberg theoreticians. Their ideas were a hangover from the world of print. The “queer theorists” who loved Derrida during the early 90s for giving them the tools to disrupt the male/female binary were not prepared for what was to come a decade later.¹

V. Conclusion: The F-Word Is Edgy and Our Books Are Always Being Banned

...Because, of course, the pragmatic and material realities of the digital age did eventually catch up with these intellectual types. And when these intellectual and university-educated guys recognized what was happening, as eventually they did, they also understood that they could use magic words to their advantage, too. I’ve discussed this extensively in an essay called “On Pretentious Rhetoric.” I won’t bore the reader with too long a summary, but my point was basically that the conditions of digital-era language have allowed them to use language as a barrier to entry, something to keep outsiders away from their jobs. Magic words, for them, are a meta-diglossic construction that has the same effect as regular diglossia, except it’s highly contextual, idiomatic, and shifting as opposed to fixed, universal, and certain. If you say the bad word, you’ll never get to join their club – even if it wasn’t bad at the time you said it!

I’ll conclude by returning to the F-word, the most offensive word you can supposedly say, at least according to that poll I was told about at university. Since then, it has become common to see “fuck” everywhere, which confirms the idea that no one considers it so offensive. Sure, people don’t say it on cable television still, but it ranks pretty low in the list of offensive things one could possibly say. It isn’t, you know, dead-naming a trans-person, or something like that. But it’s curious to me how commonly you’ll see it in bookshops. If you walk into one, you’ll see it all over the titles of self-help paperbacks designed to sell quickly. I’m far from the only one to notice it. What gives?

I think this is primarily a trend among liberal enlightenment-value types desperately trying to make sense of the changing world around them. They want to convince themselves that they are still eternally locked in a struggle to overcome magic words; they’re conquering the mysticism of language, and they’re proving it by saying the F-word over and over again. Beyond these book titles, there’s the “What The Fuck” podcast with Marc Maron, exactly the sort of guy I’m talking about, and there’s also the “I Fucking Love Science” web site. The author doesn’t just believe in science, rationality, demystification, logic, and so on: she fucking loves them.

This trend is a coping mechanism. At the moment in which they’re most aggressively policed for potentially violating language taboos, the sorts of people who still buy books will go to great lengths to convince themselves that the F-word is offensive – paradoxically by saying it over and over to no real social censure.

Another similar book-related trend is the tendency for liberals to tell each other to “read banned books” and sell them in bookstores. Most of the books they consider “banned,” of course, are widely available, easy to read, and even placed on children’s school curricula. In one fascinating case, the graphic novel Maus was removed from a small Tennessee school district’s curriculum, which of course means that it had been seen as important enough to put there in the first place. The media decided that this counted as a “ban” even though the district never claimed they would prevent any students from bringing their own copy to school. Liberals then breathlessly insisted to one another that the Tennessee school district is trying to suppress knowledge of the Holocaust from their students. And, of course, if you walk into a book store just about anywhere, it will have a “banned books” section, and Maus will be sitting there.

Meanwhile, on Amazon dot com, the only book store that actually matters, a ton of books are actually, seriously banned, like Holocaust denial books, books challenging the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, books promoting conversion therapy for homosexuals, and quaint little tomes such as My Nationalist Pony, a white nationalist argument for watching My Little Pony written by a fellow who calls himself “Buttercup Dew.” Will we see these books placed on a “read banned books” flier anytime soon in a public school somewhere? If “banned” can be taken as an adjective of degree, then what exactly is more banned? A book that some podunk school board removed from its curriculum (without actually forbidding it) while being widely available on Amazon dot com and every commercial bookstore in the country? Or a book that you can’t buy from any major book provider and must purchase in e-book form through an obscure web site? To ask the question is to answer it.

The obsession with curse words and being banned is a form of nostalgia for simpler times. I actually predicted some time ago that liberals would drop the “read banned books” gimmick because the cognitive dissonance would be too much for them to handle. But alas – when it comes to language and taboo, I think this is where our dear friends will be stuck for the foreseeable future. The Gutenberg universe is just too cozy for them to give up, because in it, ideas are what ultimately matter, style and substance are easy to differentiate, books can change the world, and expression has no inherent meaning, except of course when you’re transgressing the idea that it does. The electronic world has passed these poor people by, and like hamsters forever running on their hamster wheels, they will work tirelessly to keep themselves in the exact same place. Locked in the same struggles. Overcoming the same age-old curse words by saying them a lot. Claiming the same kinds of books are “banned" and then daring to read them. Refusing to notice that their time is out of joint until the grim reaper pays them a visit and they hop on the last rattler.

1. Not to get too off-track here, but when conservatives claim that “wokeness” is a direct result of French structuralism, they’re mistaken. In order for wokeness to be fully realized, the mania for structuralism had to decline.