Suzanne Harrington: Generation gaps and changing language
In the olden days, when Gen X were growing up in the Seventies and Eighties - when people smoked on buses and told racist jokes on telly - you could only be prosecuted if you harmed someone physically.
So if you thumped someone whilst calling them a racist / misognyist / ableist / homophobic slur, you’d get done for the thumping but nothing more – for hurting their physical feelings, but not their psychological ones. We were taught about sticks and stones breaking bones, but names never hurting.
Gen Z, growing up now, cannot fathom how we tolerated such barbarity. The idea of being able to hurl verbal sticks and stones without consequence is as incomprehensible to young adults today as getting your head stoved in with actual sticks and stones a generation ago.
My kids and their peers, cheerfully swearing like sailors since primary school, would rather swallow their own tongues than utter anything culturally -ist or -ic.
Gen Z may have to subsequently weather accusations of snowflakery, but their absolute refusal to tolerate even casual, unintentional or unconscious instances of -ism or -ia is to be applauded.
This is not Gen Z namby-pambyism – it’s a fierce rebuttal of the kind of verbal violence that Gen X grew up with and put up with. Poofs and lezzers and trannies and retards and n-words and that whole nine yards of hate speech liberally directed at anyone not white, hetero, able-bodied or male. Words like Paki were still in use.
The fact that hate speech has been criminalised so that you can no longer hurl verbal sticks and stones feels long overdue to all those who have spent forever on its receiving end. About time.
But there’s still room for misinterpretation. A Northern English friend was recently charged with racism for using the word ‘monkey’ when assaulted by dodgy night club bouncers (one of whom was black). In Northern English vernacular, confirms Wiktionary, monkey means “uncouth and uncivilised”; the bouncers took it to mean that racist word that racists still sometimes shout at football matches.
My Northern English friend, furious at being set upon by uncouth and uncivilised bouncers, used the wrong word. Had he said donkey rather than monkey, nothing would have happened - instead he had to spend thousands on barristers to clear his name. Ironically, he works for a global human rights NGO – calling him racist would be like calling Elton John homophobic.
Today, he says, people’s feelings are protected by law, which can quite literally lead to thought crime: the bouncers told the cops they thought he was racist. I ask my kids what they think. “He said ‘monkey’?” they ask incredulously. They only know it as a racist term.
As language evolves and mutates, let us never underestimate the power of sticks and stones.
