Title

Editorial: Understanding our foul mouths

Document Type

Editorial

Authors

Sarah Allisot

Date

4-16-2018

Keywords

Social privilege, Coded language, Hate speech

Files

Description

The language we use matters, regardless of how small individual words seem in the moment. It’s too easy to disconnect from a place of privilege and safety and ask,“Who cares?” The answer to that misguided question is people — living, breathing people who face aggression because we let coined phrases and words come out before really thinking about them. And that’s the best scenario. There are always those incidences where language is used as a weapon, meant to degrade or devalue certain people with the powerful backing of social context. Words don’t translate in a vacuum, free from our social landscape. That’s why searching for the “real” definition of a word in the dictionary is nothing more than a ploy distracting from the real point — that words have multiple meanings, and many of them aren’t pretty.

Identifier

Racial Justice_Maine Campus_2021_01_17l

Rights and Access Note

This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. In addition, no permission is required from the rights-holder(s) for educational uses. For other uses, you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Recommended Citation

Allisot, Sarah, "Editorial: Understanding our foul mouths" (2018). University of Maine Racial Justice Collection. 198.
https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/racial_justice/198