Should all words be pliable?

The following was first published in the Villager newspaper.

The Villager is a weekly Namibian newspaper.

Should all words be pliable?

Andrew SevenSeven

So I’m sure you’ve seen the new Trevor Noah show, That’s Racist, right? Maybe you bought the DVD or copied it from a friend, whatever, the show was pretty funny. Besides the humour, he really got the crowd buying into the philosophy that words were quite pliable if you invest enough time to changing it. The focus word here was kaffir and he really believes that if we use it often enough, particularly in mundane contexts, the word would lose the power it so tightly holds over the southern African region. It’s not a word that gets used often-although get used it does, let’s not kid ourselves (and in very racist contexts as well), and most of the continent does seem to be slowly forgetting the bitter word, nevertheless when it does show its head it has a way of turning even the kindest heart into a pungent jumble of bile. But such was Trevor’s charismatic sway that he even got a few impressionable white girls to call themselves kaffirs.

If you look to history, it’s a given fact that words can change meanings over time. After all gay used to mean cheerful or merry. The American counterpart of the word kaffir has been embraced by the black community there, so much so that it is employed as many times as the word ‘the’ in the average rap video.

But has that actually made things better? Why does it feel like much of the community that has embraced this word amongst them also endorses some of the foulest lifestyles on the face of the earth? Not to mention that the actual meaning of the word hasn’t been changed, has it? Nigger is still used to refer to black people, even in the black communities, and it still carries some of the negativity previously associated with it.

Words very rarely fully disengage themselves from the association attached to them, even over time. Gay may now mean homosexual, but that that is still due to most of that community’s over eccentric gesticulations. But perhaps what’s worrying is that a lot of women are starting to use this kind of thinking with regards to the B word. For most, it’s no longer an insult now. It doesn’t matter that the word means a female dog. It can be changed to mean something else. But how many of these people would be fine with their young daughters calling themselves that?

Besides that, isn’t word association one of the many things that set us apart from animals? We’re people after all. Should we just disregard the fact that our parents and grandparents died so we’d be freed from the old systems? Isn’t pain a part of being human? A lot of us have a greater respect for history and our ancestors now because we still appreciate the weight behind the words they were lashed with.

When the comedy shows are over, what will we tell our children about our past, and what will their reaction be if their association with the word is nothing different to what they have with a cellphone charger or a glass of water?