RHYS BOWEN:
Most of you will know that I came back from Europe with Covid. I was the one who wore my mask on buses and trains and indoor settings and yet I caught it in Paris (where there wasn’t a mask in sight and everyone was coughing). So I spent a miserable few days confined to my hotel room. I arrived home, still quarantined.
Well, at last I tested negative!
I texted my kids saying “I’m negative at last. Hooray.”
And then I stopped to think about this. I’ve always considered myself a positive person—glass half full, unicorns and rainbows etc. So how can I rejoice at being negative? This made me think about the power of words and how the concept of a word can get so twisted. From now on I suspect that nobody will want to say they are positive. It carries the dread connotation of seeing that red line appear and knowing that there is nothing one can do about it. Of being infectious, dangerous.
I can think of other words that have become twisted from their original meaning. When I was young it was okay to say I’m feeling gay. We used it a lot. It meant happy with overtones of joie de vivre and lightheartedness. A lovely word. Now it’s come to mean only one thing and can’t be used in its original context any more.
The same goes for queer. When I young if I felt out of sorts I was feeling queer. Not any more. I can think of lots more like that. It’s interesting how words suddenly get twisted in popular use, isn’t it? Smashing meaning good. Bad meaning good. Wicked meaning good. IN UK everything is cracking these days. Let’s get cracking. Crack on. This is cracking (meaning great). Where did that come from? And pear-shaped. Things go pear-shaped in the UK, meaning start to go wrong.
And one I’ve always mused over is the use of black and white for skin color. I’ve never met a person who was black or one who was white. We are all shades of pink and brown. But by choosing those words in the beginning we have intentionally attached concepts of good and bad, right and wrong to them. The good guys wear white hats. Blackness equals night, darkness, fear. I wonder how our world would have evolved differently if we’d said “He’s a brown person, I am a pinkish ivory sort of person.” Neither inherently better than the other.
A story about my daughter in pre-school. She came home one day and asked me what the N word meant. I was shocked and asked her where she had heard it. She said a boy had told her it was a bad word. I explained that it was something you said to black people to make them feel really upset and sad, sort of like if I’d said to her “You are so ugly and stupid and nobody likes you.”
She frowned, thinking about this for a moment then she said, “I don’t know any black people.”
This surprised me because her teacher was African American. “What about Miss Kathleen?” I asked.
She gave me a look of utter scorn. “She’s brown,” she said.
And there you have it.
So what are your thoughts? Which words have changed meaning during your lifetimes?
AND on a lighter note: The lovely folk at Britbox always alert us to new series that our Jungle Red Family would love. The newest addition, that I got to review last week, is based on Val McDermid's Karen Pirie novels. Gritty Scottish crime with an appealing main character, a policewoman who has to fight for respect as well as justice. My one caveat is that the Scottish dialect may be a challenge for some people! if you'd like to see the trailer, here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AtbQL0Muhg
But that's what words and their meanings do, isn't it? Language is constantly in flux.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, glad you are COVID-negative, Rhys!
I do try in my books not to call out the darker-skinned people any differently than the lighter-skinned characters.
My kids make fun of me when I say I’m “hooking up” with a friend… and as writers it’s our job to keep up
ReplyDeleteI can think of several "new" slang words/acronyms that I see all the time:
ReplyDeleteGHOSTED
WOKE
G.O.A.T.
Add to that bespoke, pivot - even in books that are in their point of time before now - just doesn't fit in.
DeleteWhen I was a teenager everything was "tough", meaning cool, attractive, etc. That's the wonderful/awful thing about language, especially English, that it evolves so much over time.
ReplyDeleteRight there with you, Rhys, on skin color.
I can't think of a thing this morning! But the TV show trailer looks great, thanks Rhys!
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a teen, the "in" word was bitchin. Everything cool was bitchin. The word I love is the British "cheeky", as in she's rather cheeky isn't she? Not sure the undertone of the word as the British use it though. The Scottish film with Karen Pirie looks very good. I love the scenery.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous, I am curious about where you lived as a teen. My cousin went off to University in New Mexico and that was her exclamation of choice at the time. I was at University on the East Coast. We did not use that term here, that I remember.
DeleteIn French, some people say: c’est malade (it’s sick) about something attractive or fun.
ReplyDeleteBizarre because for me it always meant not feeling well at all. No idea how it came to change.
Danielle
Glad you are "negative," Rhys. Terrific examples of how meanings change in language. It doesn't only happen in English. The word I used for "finished" or to say, "I am done," in Hebrew when I lived there in the 1970's now is only used with sexual connotation. Nobody uses it any more for any other purpose.
ReplyDeleteSo interesting!
DeleteOh, Rhys, the interview with Debs Thursday night was great fun! (And your book is on the way!! Whoot! Whoot!)
ReplyDeleteSo glad you enjoyed it, Judy, and thanks for the question!
DeleteXXOO
DeleteThanks Judy. I hope you enjoy the book
DeleteRHYS, good morning ☀️. The britbox offers the English subtitles so if the Scottish dialect is difficult, then just turn on the English subtitles/ captions.
ReplyDeleteYes, the power of words can affect people. I totally understand what your daughter meant about miss Kathleen. I did not know about the word nigger until I was learning about the civil rights protests and the history. I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that some Americans used to own slaves. 👀 😳.
Definitely remember that word Gay. I started laughing because when I read your paragraph, I was reminded of my first year at university. I had a Sign Language 🤟 interpreter who told me that he is Gay. I asked him if he is Gay, then why does he have a sad face? I thought Gay people were supposed to be happy 🤦🏻♀️
I remember the word that used to be a reference to a female dog. Now it is used to put down women and I hate that word. I refuse to read a novel where a man calls a woman that word that rhymes with rich. I only use that word to refer to a female dog.
The words fat and ugly can really hurt. I remember when I was 12 and a boy would say I was fat (not true). I knew I was not because my modeling agent said that I was slender. I was tall for my age. Now that boy is an overweight adult. In kindergarten, there was a mean girl who said I was ugly because I had red hair and freckles. I did not understand why looks was so important. All I knew was that this person did not like me.
People who set out to hurt other people are hurting themselves. I read that somewhere.
Think about American ads. The power of words is evident when you see consumers convinced that they need to buy a certain product.
So sorry that you caught Covid. We went to a restaurant yesterday for the first time since the pandemic and 🤞🤞that we all will be okay because our waiter was NOT wearing a mask and never asked us for proof that we are vaccinated. When my mom and I went to another restaurant about a year ago, they asked for proof that we were vaccinated. So I’m sure that all of the servers were vaccinated,
Hope that you are feeling better and welcome back to the USA.
Just remembered something. Do they still say “bloody” as a swear word in England?
Diana
Diana, I was also going to mention turning on the closed captioning. My husband is fully deaf in one ear, and partly so in the other, so I turned on the CC on all our TVs years ago. But I found it made a huge difference for me, too, in understanding accented speech.
DeleteEveryone now acts as if the pandemic is over, Diana!
DeleteHmmm my comment didn't appear, I wonder if Blogger rejects certain words. I'll try again: I'm glad you are better Rhys!
ReplyDeleteLanguage is always changing and evolving. When I was a teen, "far out!" was an exclamation of delight. My son came home from pre-school and described one of his new friends as "brown-skinned." We are so used to tip-toeing around race that it took me aback. In Mexican culture, they celebrate the Virgin of Guadalupe as "la Morena", the brown one.
One of my 9-1-1 friends told us that when she first started working there, she received a call from a guy complaining about the "hose in the street." She could not understand why he would be so upset about this and was not familiar with the slang term for a person selling sexual favors. (I took our the word Blogger might have objected to)
Gillian, far out! LOL on the hose in the street! Is it a pair of socks or something the gardener left behind?
DeleteI don’t know what it is like in other countries, but it seems that in Canada an alert of any sort – Amber, bad guy, escaped fugitive, whatever – can show a picture, but never seems to say the skin colour or facial features of the person in character. So the alert will say 5’3”, wearing a toga, but never says skin colour, which would be the first thing that you notice. There is a big difference between looking for a black, white, Asian – which should again be subdivided, Downs, First Nation person who is 5’3” wearing a toga. I suspect gender will be the next thing to go.
ReplyDeleteHealthwise we were flu-ed last week, covid-ed this week, so now all we need is a haircut, and then we can hibernate for the winter. Then I will order Britbox, and veg…
I hope you recovered from everything
DeleteWhen my son was very little, maybe 3 or 4, he had never seen any dark-skinned people in real life. But we were out of town at a restaurant and he noticed a couple. "There are the Jeffersons," he announced. I now find it interesting that he had never commented about people with different skin color on TV; maybe I can thank Sesame Street for that.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was teaching home economics in NC, I only had girl students (so special reason why, that was just how the schedule worked.) But my colleague had a class that was all boys and they gave her a lot of trouble. She was from SC and certainly knew better, but she was extremely frustrated. After trouble with one boy, the other boys told her she just had to say "shut up, N word." Several times they told her to do that. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted it, but in my mind she was as much a victim as anyone.
Then there was the time I worked in a preschool. One very bright boy was angry and lashing out. He shocked us all when he shouted "leave me alone you four-eyed bitches!" Obviously he had heard that remark somewhere. But none of the teachers wore glasses so later we found it to be very funny.
I thank God I have Millennial and Gen Z kids to check my language - not just because I don't want to accidentally offend, but because when I'm writing characters younger than I am, I want to get them right. I have a Millennial character who is telling a friend she found nothing, and I had her say, "I found zip." Which, along with zippo and bupkis are all slang terms I am comfortable with. My 30 year old daughter told me, "If it was to a friend, I'd just say, 'I found f-----g nothing.'"
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, dear readers, I raised her in a no-swearing household and taught her we use different words in different contexts, so this is just a preview of where the language is going.
When I was in seventh and eighth grades in the early sixties, kids often used the word “boss” to indicate approval. So, someone could say something they agreed with, and they would respond “that’s boss”.They liked your jacket? “That jacket is boss.”
ReplyDeleteDebRo
Ooo, I had forgotten that, Deb!!
DeleteSo interesting about the language, Rhys, especially on the loaded terms for the color of people's skin. We are all either brown or pink or somewhere in between, but descriptions are a minefield for writers these days. I would describe myself as "olive" but apparently even that can be considered offensive. (And how did that descriptive term come into being, I wonder, as I am definitely not green.)
ReplyDeleteOh, and another thumb's up for Britbox's Karen Pirie. I've watched the first episode and it is so good!!
Clare: Sisters in Crime had a good seminar on describing people of color. I had never noticed before how often darker skin is compared to food! Olive, chocolate, coffee. Whereas we seldom describe a white man as vanilla pudding with cherry jello cheeks. They had a good guide on better ways to describe people.
DeleteOne word I used to hear a lot when I was a kid is niggardly. It was a great synonym for miserly or stingy. No one uses it now because it is perceived as a racial slur.
ReplyDeleteNo perception! It is a racial slur!
DeleteHaving been born in 1954, I've encountered some words that or phrases that I now consider abhorrent, and what's interesting is that growing up, there were some words freely used that I thought were wrong even before gained a mature view of the world. The one that comes to mind was the phrase to "jew somebody down" on a price of something, which meant haggling or bargaining for a cheaper price, an antisemitic term if ever there was one. It's interesting to me that in view of WWII being a not-so-distant memory and the extermination of millions of Jewish people that using such a term would still be in existence in the 50s and 60s. Of course, if you've watched Ken Burns' amazing recent documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust, you were enlightened to our country having a widespread distrust and dislike of Jews. I knew that there were people who were antisemitic in the U.S. at that time, but I didn't realize until seeing Burns' documentary just how widespread it was. In fact, eugenics, the study of desirable traits in a superior race (very simple definition) based on the Nordic model and how to increase those people and decrease the undesirables. Laws such as making interracial marriage illegal were "eugenics laws." Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He admired the U.S. handling of the "Indian problem" and the Jim Crow laws. It's really amazing when you start to research it, just how much our country's prejudices formed Hitler's final solution. So, having a phrase that is directly insulting to the Jewish people in our American vernacular is disturbing, to say the least. Although I haven't heard this phrase in decades, the current license to hate unleashed by the Trump administration has Jews squarely in the cross-hairs again. In the "Unite the Right" in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, the far-right demonstrators chanted "Jews will not replace us" and "Blood and Soil" (a phrase drawn from Nazi ideology). Again, the infiltration of these phrases and words into our society are powerful. Words Have Power. We have to be on guard against these words that will hurt, even kill, people. Powerful indeed.
ReplyDeleteMy health club is the Jewish Community Center and we now have to have armed security guards. It makes no sense to me. How can one hate such cultured and educated people?
DeleteIt's a mystery to me, too. So much distrust and hatred going back centuries. It is "the longest hatred" indeed.
DeleteKathy, thank you for addressing this important topic in such complete detail. I thought about writing a similar response, but wasn’t sure this was the appropriate forum, I was wrong, it most certainly is an appropriate forum! It is an important topic and it needs to be addressed , even if makes a few people uncomfortable! Again, thank you!
DeleteOops. I realize I left a sentence unfinished, and its finish had meaning. "In fact, eugenics, the study of desirable traits in a superior race (very simple definition) based on the Nordic model and how to increase those people and decrease the undesirables" should have read "In fact, eugenics, the study of desirable traits in a superior race (very simple definition) based on the Nordic model and how to increase those people and decrease the undesirables was rampant in the United States in the beginning of the 20th century." Also, I should have added that you might want to look up famous people and companies who supported eugenics.
ReplyDeleteKathy, it is chilling. There are so many incidents of anti-Semitism now, that it cannot be ignored. Thank you for addressing this topic here today.
ReplyDeleteJudy, I appreciate you responding. I can get a little carried away, even when I'm trying to pare it down. It's just all so important that I feel we must keep it in front of us.
DeleteCongrats on being Covid-negative, Rhys! And yes, the power of words. The changing nature of language. It's such a fascinating subject, and one so charged with emotion.
ReplyDelete