“You dil#o!” I yelled to my little sister. It was a new insult the kids at school were using to call someone stupid. Of course I had no idea what the word meant, but it sounded funny, and I picked it up. My mom sent me to the dictionary to look up the word, then to decide if that was something I wanted to call my little sister. (Impressive parenting moment there!) It was not. I was embarrassed.
I don’t know who started that ridiculous use of that word, or how widespread it was. Was that just my little school circle, or were children across the nation calling each other sex toys? Thankfully, to my memory, it was as short-lived as wearing elephant-leg pants or hairy socks, and I probably wouldn't remember it at all had it not been for that dictionary moment.
As a linguist, what I do know is that words and language, at their roots, are intentional, and a powerful tool for shaping or manipulating our minds. Following are a few words I remember from my childhood that meant little to me at the time but were quietly shaping my prejudices.
The term, jew or jew down, used pejoratively as a verb, meant to bargain down a price to the point of cheating the buyer/seller. “Don’t let him jew you down.” I understood the term as a child, but I knew nothing about Jewish people, and, to my knowledge, there were no Jewish people anywhere near the area where I grew up. Still, the bargaining language I was using was prejudicing my mind for the later time when I would become aware of Jewish people.
Another term I heard as a child was Indian giver. This referred to someone who gave you something and then took it back. Again, as a child, I used the term with my schoolmates without realizing that the term was prejudicing us into thinking that Native American people could not be trusted.
There was another term I used to hear that meant that something broken was not really fixed but was rigged to function a little while, like maybe with a rubber band holding it together. The blatantly racist term was later softened by one letter change to jigger-rigged. As a child, this language taught me that black people weren't smart enough to properly repair something.
My schoolmates also used to tell polack jokes. I had no idea what the word polack meant, that it had anything to do with Poland or Polish, or that it was a pejorative term. The jokes were just about foolish people, similar to the more recent “blond” jokes. How many polacks does it take to screw in a light bulb, etc. Yet, at whatever point in my life I learned what the word polack meant, I already had an ingrained impression about the people.
Let's look at one more. Several of my childhood friends, myself included, had a deck of Old Maid cards. This was a children’s matching game, in which every card had a match except for the Old Maid card, which was forever being traded around, because whoever ended up the Old Maid at the end of the game was the loser. Again, the term old maid meant nothing to me as a child. It was just a game. But whoever originated the idea to market such a game to children had a strategy - to feed into children’s minds that there was something bad about women who did not marry. Otherwise, would he not have chosen to make the unmatched card a skunk or a rotten egg or almost anything else? Why an unmarried woman, which is not even a childhood concept.
Our schoolmates, our parents, and our communities did not make up these terms. The language was passed down to them as children just as it was passed to us, and that earlier generation got it the same way from their elders. My childhood community was agricultural and hard-working, not analyzers of language or studiers of people groups.
At some point in history, each of these terms was deliberately, intentionally, and strategically set into motion by someone or a group of someones who wanted to plant seeds of prejudice into our minds. New terms are continually invading our brain space, coming from politics, social media, religion, etc.
We don’t have to invite them in to stay. We can train ourselves to recognize the terms as invaders and to block them from setting up tents or constructing castles to live forever in our minds. And we can ask ourselves who is benefitting from poisoning our minds with such prejudices, and what is behind such manipulation.
What other prejudicial terms have you encountered?
As a linguist, what I do know is that words and language, at their roots, are intentional, and a powerful tool for shaping or manipulating our minds. Following are a few words I remember from my childhood that meant little to me at the time but were quietly shaping my prejudices.
The term, jew or jew down, used pejoratively as a verb, meant to bargain down a price to the point of cheating the buyer/seller. “Don’t let him jew you down.” I understood the term as a child, but I knew nothing about Jewish people, and, to my knowledge, there were no Jewish people anywhere near the area where I grew up. Still, the bargaining language I was using was prejudicing my mind for the later time when I would become aware of Jewish people.
Another term I heard as a child was Indian giver. This referred to someone who gave you something and then took it back. Again, as a child, I used the term with my schoolmates without realizing that the term was prejudicing us into thinking that Native American people could not be trusted.
There was another term I used to hear that meant that something broken was not really fixed but was rigged to function a little while, like maybe with a rubber band holding it together. The blatantly racist term was later softened by one letter change to jigger-rigged. As a child, this language taught me that black people weren't smart enough to properly repair something.
My schoolmates also used to tell polack jokes. I had no idea what the word polack meant, that it had anything to do with Poland or Polish, or that it was a pejorative term. The jokes were just about foolish people, similar to the more recent “blond” jokes. How many polacks does it take to screw in a light bulb, etc. Yet, at whatever point in my life I learned what the word polack meant, I already had an ingrained impression about the people.
Let's look at one more. Several of my childhood friends, myself included, had a deck of Old Maid cards. This was a children’s matching game, in which every card had a match except for the Old Maid card, which was forever being traded around, because whoever ended up the Old Maid at the end of the game was the loser. Again, the term old maid meant nothing to me as a child. It was just a game. But whoever originated the idea to market such a game to children had a strategy - to feed into children’s minds that there was something bad about women who did not marry. Otherwise, would he not have chosen to make the unmatched card a skunk or a rotten egg or almost anything else? Why an unmarried woman, which is not even a childhood concept.
Our schoolmates, our parents, and our communities did not make up these terms. The language was passed down to them as children just as it was passed to us, and that earlier generation got it the same way from their elders. My childhood community was agricultural and hard-working, not analyzers of language or studiers of people groups.
At some point in history, each of these terms was deliberately, intentionally, and strategically set into motion by someone or a group of someones who wanted to plant seeds of prejudice into our minds. New terms are continually invading our brain space, coming from politics, social media, religion, etc.
We don’t have to invite them in to stay. We can train ourselves to recognize the terms as invaders and to block them from setting up tents or constructing castles to live forever in our minds. And we can ask ourselves who is benefitting from poisoning our minds with such prejudices, and what is behind such manipulation.
What other prejudicial terms have you encountered?
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Questions for deeper thought:
1. Why target children with terms they don't even understand?
2. How else does this happen? In songs for example.
3. If someone wanted to manipulate the minds of an entire culture, where/how would they make such an attempt? To what ages? Might certain segments of the population be easier to manipulate than others? Why (not)?
4. How can similar strategies be used for good, to teach us love, compassion, and care for each other? Where have you seen examples of this?
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