Jewish Atheist

“The tongue of man is a twisty thing,
and there are plenty of words there
of every kind, the range of words is wide,
and their varience.”

Homer, Iliad

“Next in criminality to him who violates the laws of his country, is he who violates the language.”

Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations

He said, “f***ing retarded” (I’m using the asterisks not out of fake propriety but to avoid being targeted by porn sites). There’s a firestorm of rage, a profusion of apologies.

It’s a language matter that deseves comment from professionals. Way too many laypeople think they know about language. Others who will vent their spleen on the issue can’t even see how their own anger is stirred up, over nothing.

Double whammy

Let’s be objective. This expression contains two words, EACH of which is emotionally loaded in its own right. First, f***, the subject of rigid language taboos that might be (among other things) strong markers of class, context, and speaker-audience relationship, is, as a participial adjective, one of the most florid and remarkable language developments in modern English. Consider:

(1) I won’t drive your uncle’s f***ing car.
(2) I won’t drive your f***king uncle’s car.

This is one of the most common uses — as a term of disparagement. It adds an extra dollop of contempt to the refusal, implying a disagreeable quality of the word denoted by the noun: broken-down car, bad-tempered uncle.

But other uses abound, including as an infix: un-fucking-believable. Books have already been written on this subject. Another large class of uses: F***ing expresses general dissatisfaction with the situation, e.g., So we go into this big f***king house…, or conversely, respect for some element of it: He’s got this big fucking SUV.

Another use: as an intensifier, equivalent to ‘very’/'incredibly’/'truly’ (the case at hand).

Weird stuff

But all have in common that weirdest of linguistic behaviors (right up there with glossolalia), language taboos. As with religion, certain words are accorded BY CONSENSUS to be unutterable in mostly public contexts, the consequence being…? I don’t know — I never tried it. I spent too much of my life among people whose punishment is ostracism, if not worse, for the use of that word, i.e., regular people, their regularity defined by their behavior around this and other taboo words explored at length by George Carlin.

Just words

Lenny Bruce was neither the first nor the last to say: Folks, they’re just words. There are many names for Blacks, as Clarence Page and I recently pointed out in separate columns. But there’s one, n****r, you can’t use, except when you can (i.e., contexts are sharply defined) just as with f***.

Some religious Jews practice total language taboos, making God so much a mystery that you even can’t say his name, you need G-d (he’s watching every fucking hyphen?), shaddai (’the Almighty’),ha-shem (a double avoidance; it means “the name”), tetragrammatons (YHWH, Yahweh, Jehovah).

Name in vain (??)

God’s name is the subject of the Third Commandment. Enshrined in the most basic rules of behavior are language taboos, written in stone. “Take his name in vain” rolls right off the tongue, and if it refers also to non-god-related taboo words, it’s easy to construe it as a prohibition against something we’re very familiar with: the use of taboo words.

But the commandment doesn’t prohibit cunt, fuck or piss. It only has to do with God’s name. It might have to do with things like “I swear to God…” or “as God is my witness,” said when the speaker doesn’t mean it.

(BTW, what do atheists say when they have orgasms? Do you have to train yourself not to cry out to God? Should you?)

New taboo

Taboo words now include REtard, accent on the first syllable. This suggests a bigoted, Southern, good-ol’-boy redneck who’s at once loved (in the media) and hated (in reality and by America’s liberals and elites). In all other uses, the accent is on the second syllable. So right away that initial accent comes as a verbal blow from someone who probably knows that REtard, an intended insult, is a very different word from reTARD.

Accent on the first syllable differentiaties the intended insult from the (somewhat) neutral English word. And what is the insult? That the name caller is intelligent but the retard is not? But there will always be people more intelligent that the name-caller (retards never think of this argument).

Retard has been preceded on this course by idiot, moron, and imbecile. They used to be technical terms but have long since moved on to their derived meanings, e.g, ’someone who lacks the intelligence that the name-caller thinks necessary.’ The word is an epithet, a metaphor. Such a person could in fact have a normal IQ compared to the population at large.

Power of names

Names have power, no question, And in this age of multiculturalism, fake egalitarianism (where’s the Zulu Tolstoy? asked Saul Bellow), political correctness, exquisite sensitivity, and gotcha politics, the word retard becomes a target. Hey come on, liberals, it indicates ignorance on the part of the name-caller (including false pride in his/her own intelligence). People are unequal. That’s a fact. Liberals should stop pretending everyone’s equal. Bullies and bigots should stop exploiting the fact that they aren’t.

So REtard is undergoing a watering-down process. Retarded has moved on, weakened, generalized, become a general term of opprobrium. That’s how it was used in the offending expression. The speaker was not talking about the feebleminded (an archaic term which I like).

Retarded can now apply to ANY person, thing or idea.

If a person, then it means ‘insensitive,’ ‘naive,’ ‘elementary in his/her thinking,’ ‘lacking acuity,’ ‘not up to speed/snuff in some way,’ or even ‘outright delusional.’ Applied to things, it means ‘useless,’ ‘wrong for obvious reasons, ‘frivolous.” Applied to ideas, it means ‘obvious,’ ’simplistically stupid,’ ‘impractical for obvious reasons,’ or even ‘archaic’ (the retarded idea that women should stay home and have babies). These are just first observations — there may be other meanings.

The two words have even conjoined in the epithet fucktard, which stigmatizes the hopelessly “retarded.” No wonder atheists so often use it to refer to babbling evangelicals, braying imams, oily televangelists, Pope-ass-kissing Cardinals and davening hasidim.

Thus, f***ing retarded probably means “ridiculously simplistic/impractical/futile.’ But how much more memorable was the original! The speaker chose to cloak his disapproval with the power of TWO verbal taboos. But the neutral terms sound priggish and sterile, while f***ing retarded makes the speaker hip, one of the guys, adept in the latest way to sling insults. And what could be more important than that?