ABSTRACT
In British journalism there is a self-styled neophiliac imperative wherein there is a self-conscious pride in the breakthrough, a national need to create a note, a tone, a phrase, a vogue before anyone else—especially an American—happens upon it. The disarmament of taunts and expletives in the ethnic or racial context can be pacific or militant, gentle or angry, calculating or unintentional. In the whole record of modern journalism there was one important story—and the efforts of scholarship did not round out the picture—that was rarely news and never effectively registered in the contemporary consciousness. The old-fashioned reference to “people of the Jewish faith”—although obviously the victims may well have been agnostics or even faithless atheists—recalled the arch sensitivities of yesteryear to using the J-word. The transformations of the n-word have gone so far and so fast that the new mutant form of “nigga” has, in more and more inter- and intraracial contexts, displaced the old expletive.
