antilocution

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Tue Jun 12 14:54:21 UTC 2012


On Jun 12, 2012, at 10:03 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

> Not in OED.
> 
> http://shine.yahoo.com/work-money/comes-politics-more-racist-think-185600847.html
> :
> 
> "The top hits for the top racially charged searches are nearly all textbook
> examples of antilocution, a majority group's sharing stereotype-based jokes
> using coarse language outside a minority group's presence."
> 
> Don't miss the part about Keith Judd.
> 
> JL
> 
I read a piece on this study in the Times a couple of days ago by the researcher, Stephens-Davidowitz, himself, and was struck by the fact that they had no problem publishing the actual items he had searched ("nigger(s)" but not "nigga", fourth paragraph under Obama photo); online version at http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/09/how-racist-are-we-ask-google/.
The yahoo link above uses not only a wonderful circumlocution--"He chose a common racial insult that starts with "N" and looked for searches that used the singular and plural forms of the word"--but also the rap-song favorite, n**ga, which I suppose could have been referred to as "the non-rhotic form of the word". 

LH 

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