Niamkha Berlanger -- Gloria Naylor, “The meaning of a word”

1. Identify and briefly define important words, terms, concepts, or characters.

A) Words used:

Language: The system of spoken or written communication used by a particular country, people, community, etc., typically consisting of words used within a regular grammatical and syntactic structure. Naylor refers to language as the subject and she exclaims that language is inferior to the spoken word.

Meaning: The significance, purpose, underlying truth, etc., of something.

Nigger: a) Used as a disparaging term for a Black person or any dark-skinned people.

b) Used as a disparaging term for a member of any socially, economically, or politically deprived group of people.

Nymphomaniac: A woman (or, rarely: a man) exhibiting nymphomania.

Necrophiliac: A person affected by necrophilia; a necrophile. Necrophilia is the fascination with death and dead bodies; especially sexual attraction to, or intercourse with, dead bodies.

B) Concepts mentioned:

Reality and language: Naylor writes,

I'm not going to enter the debate here about whether it is language that shapes reality or vice versa. That battle is doomed to be waged whenever we seek intermittent reprieve from the chicken and egg dispute. I will simply take the position that the spoken word, like the written word, amounts to a nonsensical arrangement of sounds or letters without a consensus that assigns "meaning." And building from the meanings of what we hear, we order reality. Words themselves are innocuous; it is the consensus that gives them true power.

Meaning and context: Naylor discusses the many different meanings of the N-word and the different times and places where it can be noted without provoking anyone. She argues that different words have different meanings to very different people.

2. Summarize the main idea, theme, action or event of the reading. Be sure to include quotations that best capture the overall feeling or mood of the reading.

Naylor wants the reader to know that words are, as I quote, “innocuous; it is there consensus that gives them true power.” To Naylor, a word is considered good or bad in its context when one is talking about meaning; different words have different meanings to various people.

In the reading, Naylor talks about her “extended family”. She describes their lifestyles in this manner;

I was part of a large extended family that had migrated from the rural South after World War II and formed a close-knit network that gravitated around my maternal grandparents. Their ground-floor apartment in one of the buildings they owned in Harlem was a weekend mecca for my immediate family, along with countless aunts, uncles, and cousins who brought along assorted friends. It was a bustling and open house with assorted neighbors and tenants popping in and out to exchange bits of gossip, pick up an old quarrel, or referee the ongoing checkers game in which my grandmother cheated shamelessly. They were all there to let down their hair and put up their feet after a week of labor in the factories, laundries, and shipyards of New York. Amid the clamor, which could reach deafening proportions--two or three conversations going on simultaneously, punctuated by the sound of a baby's crying somewhere in the back rooms or out on the street--there was still a rigid set of rules about what was said and how. Older children were sent out of the living room when it was time to get into the juicy details about "you-know-who" up on the third floor who had gone and gotten herself "p-r-e-g-n-a-n-t!" But my parents, knowing that I could spell well beyond my years, always demanded that I follow the others out to play. Beyond sexual misconduct and death, everything else was considered harmless for our young ears. And so among the anecdotes of the triumphs and disappointments in the various workings of their lives, the word nigger was used in my presence, but it was set within contexts and inflections that caused it to register in my mind as something else.

I mention her family to present the various types of people who might use the N-word in contrast to the little 3^rd grader who used it towards Naylor as a young girl. This goes to prove that the meaning of word can vary and can cause confusion, anger, or be innocuous depending on the context in which the word is used.

Naylor provided many examples in which the word ‘nigger’ can be used and its meaning at each different notion. In one intend or in the singular, the word may refer to a successful man. In the possessive, the word refers to woman’s love to a boyfriend or a husband. When spoken by a man, the word shows “the essence of manhood”. On a negative and plural note, the N-word can be used to look down upon a group of people “who overstepped the bounds of decency”. The word ‘nigger’ itself does not apply to women. Naylor provides its equivalent as girl. “A token of respect”, Naylor called it. In reference to Naylor’s personal experience, the word may also be used with a purpose of hurt and as a form of hate.

Addressing a popular misjudgment, Naylor says,

I don't agree with the argument that use of the word nigger at this social stratum of the black community was an internalization of racism. The dynamics were the exact opposite: the people in my grandmother's living room took a word that whites used to signify worthlessness or degradation and rendered it impotent. Gathering there together, they transformed ‘nigger’ to signify the varied and complex human beings they knew themselves to be. If the word was to disappear totally from the mouths of even the most liberal of white society, no one in that room was naive enough to believe it would disappear from white minds. Meeting the word head-on, they proved it had absolutely nothing to do with the way they were determined to live their lives.

She voices her opinion that blacks’ use of the word challenges the racist negative meaning assigned to it by whites by redefining the word on their own terms. They transform the word by giving it a meaning of pride rather than an insult. Naylor conveyed with her essay, that the meaning of the word ‘nigger’ changes depending on how it is used, and who uses it.

3. Formulate a question for discussion.

Does the word ‘nigger’ really vary in meaning or is bringing context in the equation a way to undermine the hurtful meaning of the word itself?