Figures of Speech Served Fresh

Quote:  “Die, N-word.  We don’t want to see you around here no more.”  Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.

Figure of Speech:  tabooism, a form of circumlocution.  From the Tongan tabu, meaning “forbidden.”

At the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s national convention, horses drew a carriage with a pine casket.  Inside the casket was the anthropomorphically embalmed word “nigger.”

Did Figaro just offend you?  Forgive him; he has a reason.

The word “nigger” didn’t become a bad word in America until the nineteenth century, when it took on pejorative connotations.  Derived from the Latin niger, meaning “black,”  it allows Figaro to demonstrate a perfect tabooism — a word or phrase that substitutes for a forbidden word.  Figaro devised the term “tabooism” himself, because circumlocution is too broad to describe the phenomenon.

A circumlocution (or periphrasis, as Figaro’s Greek homeys called it) swaps an unpleasant word or phrase with a description.  (Bodily waste for doo-doo, significant other for “guy I’m shacking up with”.)  A tabooism does the same thing, except that it substitutes only for words imbued with scary powers:  Adonai for Yahweh,  gee for Jesus, He Who Must Not Be Named for Voldemort, and the F-word for, well, you know.

Of course, one of the best ways to give a taboo more power is to ban it. By burying the N-word, the NAACP may actually turn it into one of the Figuratively Undead.

WTF?

Snappy Answer:  “S’up, person of color?”