QOTY

[Baker, John]

        Nonstandard spellings are a common technique for avoiding automatic filters, and I suspect that is what Mike Hyland was doing.  Fox may have its website configured to suspend or reject obviously racist comments, or Hyland may have suspected that to be the case even if "black man" is not something that the filter would pick up.  Google indicates only a handful of uses of "blacqman" and "blacq man."


John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Laurence Horn
Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2011 2:03 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: QOTY


Did anyone else click on the link below, which is the "Fox Nation" coverage of Cain's comment?  Of course, virtually everyone responding there was in complete agreement with the sentiment--but not everyone was fully ready to adopt Cain as standard bearer.  I was struck by what looks like a bit of orthographic euphemism in this response by Mike Hyland:

=====================
Careful as no one knows anything about this b lacqman with absolutely zero experience in government. Sounds like voting for surprise number 2 whcih comes form trusting a bla cqman to rule a country the size of the USA. Show me where in history this turned out for the betterment of the people ruled or governed by a blac qman
=====================

I don't want to focus on the obvious tension between the two...uh, narratives here (Black men in power is a Bad Thing; Blaming the victim is a Good Thing) but on the repeated use of "blacqman".  Does anyone know if this spelling is just Hyland's personal idiosyncrasy or a standard device on the part of fellow thinkers--a kind of right-wing counterpart to "Amerika"?

LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org