Welcome to Word Wars

THE WORD WARS MANIFESTO:

There is a specter haunting the field of human interaction. It isn’t a particularly impressive specter. In fact, it’s rather meek, timid, and superficially unthreatening, and most of us are so used to it that we’ve forgotten its spectral nature, thinking of it perhaps as a natural part of how we deal with other people. Certainly not a ghoul aimed at strangling spontaneity, honesty, and good writing, speaking, and art, yes? Unfortunately, no; it most definitely is involved in a death struggle with these things of value. Though this is perhaps not the most precise name for it, we can simply call this specter ‘politeness.’

Being polite does not seem to be a bad thing, at face value; just a matter of treating the other members of our species with simple dignity and perhaps keeping quiet when we might speak and offend. Simple enough, and in moderation perhaps harmless. This is hard to say, though, as this is not an area where moderation has ever reigned. Even now in our soi-disant rude modern era where civility is commonly acknowledged to be dead we are unbelievably polite, perfectly willing to napalm brown civilians but thoroughly reluctant to refer to them as ‘sand-niggers.’

As you can see, a primary concern is that being polite limits our use of language, as well as other expressive arts (we need not get into the obscenity circus swirling currently around the publication of those infamous Danish cartoons). The English language is magic, having a large and ever-increasing vocabulary, an incredible flexibility, continuing innovation, and the ability to integrate neologisms as well as foreign words into perhaps the most impressive linguistic stream in human history. We do not have the clicks and pops of San !Xu, but we have a language capable of an incredible variety of poetry – compare G.M. Hopkins to Milton to see two extremes of our language, and keep in mind that it’s continued to grow and change since they were writing.

We also have a uniquely large lexicon of insults, offensive phrases, and dirty words. We have at least a half-dozen disparaging terms for any ethnic group, and if we don’t have one of our own we run down a language that does have one, tackle it in a back alley, steal its vileness and leave it wallowing in our foetor. Open your ears to the barbed words of the bastards around you, and virtually every day will bring you fresh obscenities so savagely delightful it makes you glad to be alive and listening. Insults have a creative dynamism which necessitates continual reinvention.

However, we are asked to forget this rich and evil poetry because, we are told, words hurt. They hurt and offend deeply and we should avoid being offensive. Actually, this brings us to another point about our language: we have so many words, with such broad definitions, that two people might appear to agree in subscribing to a particular sentence that each interprets so differently that in practice they violently disagree. Politicians, the invertebrate whores at the zenith of the postmodern ziggurat, are the masters of creating such flavourless concoctions which allow them to avoid expressing any opinions whatsoever.

It is a basic tenet of humanity that we should avoid being offensive. All evolved species have social structures which involve the taboo. But ‘nigger’ is not an offensive word. ‘Nigger’ is neutral; what’s offensive is hiding the truth that you can’t walk down an American sidewalk for a block and not pass dozens of racists, hiding behind their house fronts. ‘Cunt’ is not offensive. It is, again, neutral. What’s offensive is to pretend that cunts, literal and figurative, do not exist, or are some kind of unmentionable obscenity , or should be thought of as existing in some alternate reality, halfway between the real world and the unseen, exposing themselves only when we execute that particular combination of actions that slide down those hip-hugging jeans or hike up that plaid skirt and shove the panties aside and just allow you to jam your cock (not penis and definitely not pee-pee) in there with all the bestial brutality that standing rear entry demands. Hating something is not offensive; sugar-coating, ignoring, denying, or betraying that honest hatred is.

Being polite is the Lower Paleolithic stone shard tool directed at the castration of honest expression and art. It is essentially palliative, a frantically scribbled prescription from a frightened doctor so convinced of the potency of the placebo effect he’d prescribed sugar water for prostate cancer. It’s soma. It’s shit. It’s replacing the kind of government censorship dismantled for us by men like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin with a kind of ‘lion laying down to his chains’ censorship. We are remarkably free, legally speaking, to be offensive at the moment. Let’s take advantage of it, shall we?

To be perfectly clear: this is not a call to arms for unconstrained rudeness. As said above, being polite is all right in theory and probably would be in moderation. Words have a certain power, and prohibited words more so, that they lose with familiarity, and this sense of modesty in language helps to preserve that. Being nasty just for the sake of being nasty, or for no reason other than to shock, breaks down the barriers we have built between ourselves and these powerful words. When this happens, we use up the stored magic they have for the febrile joy of a twelve year old boy’s illicit excitement upon first hearing, without even understanding it, some naughty word, and reproducing it in an inappropriate context.

Still worse is the teenaged attitude – called ‘teenaged’ but really reproduced at any point in life after the teen years – of rudeness as pointless rebellion against a parent’s world, an attempt to shock that world with one’s independence by deliberately breaking its more obvious taboos. But this is nothing more than the inverse image of the affected politeness, a pointless affectation for effect, and, again, the degradation of language. That it is by overexposure rather than rigid, unrelenting restriction is all the worse; the artificially separated profane has the magical power of the sacred. The everyday profane has nothing. These words and the offensiveness in them are dulled by overuse, and we need them kept sharp for the artist’s deft carving.

Here at this site we’re in the business of writing, using all the available avenues of language. This means we will use ugly words with relish and invention. We will be crude and nasty. And you, dear reader, will unhinge your jaw like a hungry python and accept the pipeline of our mental filth we tunnel into you, and will damn well like it.

One love,

The Word War III Team