Editorial on N word

I was a language teacher. My students loved to trick me into writing words on the board so that they could go home and tell mom and dad that Miss F had taught them the F word today...that was a cute one...No other word seems to continue to bewitch youngsters than the f word, and no it is not FUN.

So now I read at CBSnews a story about Huckleberry Finn being edited to eliminate the word "nigger" in the classical tale that Mark Twain wrote describing life in Missouri in his age.

The word "nigger" became controversial at a time when Negroes not then yet known as blacks but usually as "colored" started to grumble about the word being considered hurtful and painful to them since it was often used in a tone that was condescending and patronizing.

Tone is everything in a word. People can use the same word lovingly and tenderly so that it is considered highly desirable. In Twain's case,the word was used to specify and identify an individual the same as the term Injun was often used to describe what we today call "native Americans". Nigger Joe or Injun Joe are used in the same way so as to distinguish their characters from others in the novel.

Had a black person written it, it might have been called Whitey Huck Finn, or other designated words which were used by black people to designate the difference between them and the white people around whom they lived.

The word should be kept and retained to always show what life is like in that time period. Times change. Today he would be called the black kid...it is all that simple. Some people object to the use of colored or black but people being what they are call people by names of some kind to identify them and set them apart. Shorty is used to designate a man of smaller stature, and fatty speaks for itself. Faggot, putah, whore, slut, and many other slang words are used to designate people of a particular group and behaviour. The town whore is different from the town slut,and the faggot is often different from the queer guy or the gay guy...depending upon which person is using and saying the word.

In the movie Carousel, the song "You're a queer one, Julie Jordan, did not mean that she was a gay or lesbian woman. It meant odd one, left out one.

We live in an age where people say and use words as weapons against one another. Every child learns this as he grows for he can only learn it from adults who teach it to him. How one handles it in his home is dependent upon the members of the family. Too late people learn that it does not take a genius to have a child as children are born from the ugly, the stupid, the insane as well as the cultivated classes,the educated, and the respectable. The home bears the burden for the education and learning of the child.

Let Twain alone as he is speaking of his own time period and in his own language. Take it for what it is! A period piece!