The three words that Kobe, Tiger and Mark Twain may not utter …

April 15, 2011
By admin

Phaggot, phuck and knigger. Gasp! I’ll wait a few seconds and see if the Earth starts to tremble and the the sun is blotted into darkness without warning. No? For those with more-refined sensibilities, that’s the two F-words and the N-word. I chose my own silly way of putting the words to paper rather than the more conventional F-word, etc. nonsense because if I am going to start referring to various offensive words by whispering only the first letter, I worry about where that kind of dainty undertaking ends and how much clarity in expression is lost in the process.

Besides, if we are going to talk to each other in that bizarrely sanitized way, I think we should all get a carton of chocolate milk, a blanket and some cookies and sit cross-legged on the floor when we do it. And by the way, I chose the camouflaged “ph” versions of the two F words and the silent “k” in the other as a means of (I hope) sidestepping any traps in cyberspace that stand vigilant over the use of our naughtiest words. That kind of adult assessment would be a clearly acceptable reason for the otherwise infantilizing behavior of digging up single-letter euphemisms for words that make the linguistically squeamish blush.

If I am to understand the grotesquely circumspect news reports, Kobe Bryant has been socked for all of $100,000 for the “phaggot” aside in the wake of a beef with a referee. Just fantasizing here, but what if there were such a thing as an NBA player who made a mere $150,000, let’s say, for the whole season. Would it seem appropriate to fine a player 2/3 of a season’s salary for blurting an admittedly reprehensible invective in the heat of battle? It seems as though we’re assessing a tax here on someone based on his ability to pay. Gee, we wouldn’t want to let that kind of progressive taxation fairness doctrine seep into other areas of modern life, would we?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but we (America) seem a bit more outraged about his letting a nasty bit of vulgarity slip in the middle of a basketball game than we were with his mischief in his hotel room eight years ago. See, I am getting more adept at those euphemisms myself, though I suspect there are those who might question if “mischief” is a precise enough word in this case.

TIGER WOODS, he of similarly exalted stature within our culture and subject to even more exhaustive scrutiny than Kobe, takes heat when he groans “phuck” in exasperation after one of his drives heads to the woods at a crucial moment. When the Kobe Bryant utterance was replayed on television and on the Internet, Kobe’s lips were digitally fuzzed out so that we couldn’t decipher what horrible thing he might have said. Tiger gets no such computer-enhanced assistance when the camera catches him using the naughtiest word in our sexually-suggestive lexicon, but the announcers are typically fairly cautious in commentary and – at the pristine Masters at least – there’s no replay of the awful moment.

But anybody who has ever played golf much probably at least understands a bit about the frustration that could yield that nasty word from the otherwise genteel confines of the tee box. I can understand that parents probably feel that Tiger is falling short of the demands of being a role model when that happens, but he might have done America a favor on Thanksgiving of 2009 if he ended up reminding us that the role model status of any professional athlete probably needs carefully proscribed limits.

MARK TWAIN, one supposes, would have been roundly amused about much of the absurdity that we embrace in always scrambling first and foremost for political correctness and avoiding disrupting the sensibilities of the least sophisticated in our midst. While I am tempted here to talk about the nutty efforts to remove all traces of the word “knigger” from his classic novels, I choose instead to outline the linkage between our most dreaded word and the current putrid political climate.

I says here that much of the so-called “Birther Movement” is little more than an elaborate – but yet ham-handed – artifice – to offset the excruciating discomfort that such folks feel about having a black American in the White House. While the offending word no doubt still gets widespread unchallenged usage in many more places than we might care to admit, it thankfully does carry enough odious baggage that it’s pretty tough to squeeze it in in polite circles.

While nobody should ever confuse Washington, D.C., with polite circles, the denizens of that noxious subculture are at least sophisticated enough to try to couch their displeasure with having an African-American with a funny-sounding foreign name as President by finding some kind of convoluted, back-door way of indicating their disdain.

I would contend that the idiotic “Birther Movement” is largely fueled by the demands of political correctness that won’t allow their membership to attach to Barack Obama that most reviled of titles. Obviously, not everybody who would consent to having their name attached to such a nonsensical “movement” is a racist, but by embracing the ludicrous in circumstances such as this, they certainly invite the speculation.

The final category might be people who might shamelessly appear to embrace such lunacy as a means of furthering a political end. For these folks, I have even less regard, though I’m not sure my view can withstand close examination. Is willful ignorance somehow less deplorable than cynical political calculation? I dunno.
- T.S. O’Connell

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