Time to ethnically cleanse English? Not a Chinaman’s chance

posted at 4:42 pm on February 22, 2012 by Howard Portnoy

“Perhaps it was inevitable that a Jeremy Lin pun would eventually breach the boundaries of good taste.” So begins an article by Slate’s Huan Hsu, proving that it was equally inevitable that someone with thin skin would insist that an unfortunate headline using the word chink (meaning “cut” or “breach”) was ipso facto racist, even though its author, Anthony Federico, swears he was not going for a cheap laugh.

ESPN, on whose website the offending word appeared, decided an apology was not enough and fired Federico. Now Hsu wants to make sure the offense never happens again by taking the rather extreme step of expunging the word chink from the English language.

How deeply offended is he by that word?

I cringed during the last presidential campaign when the Huffington Post wrote about ‘the chink in Obama’s armor.’… I cringed when ESPN posted the same headline during the Beijing Olympics on a story about the U.S. men’s basketball team…. And I cringed last week when ESPN’s [Max] Bretos [who was also punished by the network] asked Knicks great Clyde Frazier if Lin had any ‘chinks in his armor.’

And it’s not just chink that makes Hsu (a self-avowed serial cringer) cringe. He regards spic-and-span and gobbledygook as eliciting the same degree of “cognitive dissonance.” Nor is he favorably disposed to faggot, which he tells us has not appeared “in the New York Times since 1981” (quelle surprise) or niggardly, which Hsu claims has been taken “out of the public lexicon” (I would argue it’s never been there).

Hsu hastens to assure the reader that his goal is “not shrinking the language” but “evolving it.” Into what, Hsu does not say, though I urge him to spend some time with the highly instructive writings of linguistic anthropologist Edward Sapir, who understood that language changes quite independently of human efforts to “evolve” it.

At the very least, Hsu should spend more time around us “whities” (aka “crackers”). That might disabuse him of the misapprehension that there is “no analogous slur for white people to help explain what it feels like to be subjected to one, nothing that succinctly and pejoratively diminishes you just for the color of your skin.”

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