“If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words.”  -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Lately, I’ve been working on ridding my vocabulary of words which have sexist, racist, or otherwise bad origins. This has led to many debate about the etymology of words and I’ve been spending a lot of time googling things like “history of the word skanky.”

I’ve never had a tolerance for people using “gay” in the pejorative sense or “nigger” at all. But I’ve never really spent much time thinking about the origins of words like “wuss” (which is a shortened version of “wussy,” reduplicated form of “pussy.”) A few years ago, I used the word “gypped” as in “I got gypped by this guy on Craigslist.” A friend who I was with got very angry and informed me that that term was a form of the word Gypsie and was as offensive as “jewed.” I had no idea the term had racist connotations and that made me realize how little I know about the history of words.

Skanky, by the way, is either adapted from the French word for snail and refers to a woman of low morals “with her boudoir on her back,” or refers to a specific type of Reggae dance which is very sexual.

I posted the first, second, and third installments of the Everything Is A Remix series. Here is the fourth and final installment.

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“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” -George Orwell

PRI’s The World had a segment on the Hebrew language and mentioned how academics were searching to create new words in Hebrew. This isn’t a feature specific to Hebrew. There are plenty of languages which have regulatory authorities whose role is to create new, official words for those languages.

I find this silly.

In the The World’s piece, they discuss how academics are coming up with a word for “hacker,” despite the Israeli population (including the media and government) using the word hacker. Since the population is already using the word, language academies are fighting a losing battle. In a world where I can, for no cost, engage in a video conference call with someone in Israel, France, and Wales simultaneously, the integration of foreign words into languages can’t be prevented.

The French language academy has even produced a list of English words which have been incorporated into French that they want banned. French law also requires that 40% of the content played on French TV and radio stations be in French.

Language is alive. It changes as society changes, as people change, as the world changes.  English speakers of today struggle with the works of Shakespeare and Beowulf requires a translation. And those changes in the English language took place before the invention of telegraphs, phones, the internet, and modern travel. Now that we live in a society where all of those things are possible, changes to language will only happen faster.