i thank whatever gods there may be that i live in a world where we hang people for making the wrong sound. consider these items: fag. nigger. cunt. ok now really look again at the actual things you just experienced: they may seem to be mere squiggles on your screen that couldn't do any harm to anyone, but as the whole world knows, they're actually supernatural weapons that can destroy people at a distance if you say them with the right inflection. indeed, having read them just now, intensified in their awful power by italics, you are already exactly as dead as john fitzgerald kennedy: real dead. (i hope that's not offensive.) or at least i have done you incalculable harm. my bad!
on the other hand, insofar as i wield these words, i am a being of unfathomable power! i can literally assault and profoundly damage the whole world by sitting here typing! that is too much power to entrust to anybody, much less everybody who is not an illiterate mute who is unable to use sign language, etc. and of course, anything that gets alec baldwin's insufferable mug off our televisions, or at least reduces his meaningless ubiquity, is most welcome. i want to emphasize that i'm perfectly sincere about that part.
let's consider together how we can make this a better world for all, and keep more alec baldwins from arising post-execution. if we want to prevent people permanently from saying or writing 'fag', we need to go to the heart of the matter, the real source of the problem: the shapes 'a', 'f' 'g' and the sounds aaaaa, fffff, and guh. if we simply banned their use, no one - not even alec frigging baldwin - could say 'fag' at all! then we'd all be equal.
think of it this way: the word 'fag' is like the evil number 11, which of course we prohibited in the year of the kike because it was being used by the necromancers to control our beloved king's alleged mind. owing to its role in this history, people find the number deeply offensive. now the fact that we couldn't mention the number 11 in the policies that banned the number 11 made it conceptually impossible to ban the number 11. but, in our quest for progress and equality, mere conceptual impossibility should never stop us from doing what is right. we won't make the same mistake again with 'fag', or we wouldn't if it were logically possible not to. as latifah said in a song that, thank god, was banned from the radio, who you callin a bitch?
admittedly, when we announced that the number 11 was banned - or would have announced it if we could have without mentioning it - the mathematicians as well as the necromancers got pissy, if that's something i'm permitted to say. in fact, they purported not to be able quite to grasp what it meant to eliminate the number 11. (i remember the horrifying last words of the monster david hilbert: "right, what's 12-1 then?" we shot him a second too late.). but we pointed out that there were, according to their own account, infinitely many other numbers; they just were not going to run out. likewise, the idea of deleting chunks of english seems to irritate writers and such, as though there weren't plenty of other words. one novelist even wanted an exemption so he could portray everyday nineteenth-century dialogue among evil slaveholders. another 'author'/terrorist/bully wanted to explore the history of homophobia in order to expose its monstrous underpinnings. sorry, that's impossible, or it would be impossible if we could institute the ban without violating it. while we're at it, we'll need to suspend the logical principle of non-contradiction. well, there are a lot of logical principles, though admittedly that's the wrong little jenga piece to remove.
but it's one thing to erase all inscriptions of the word 'nigger' and silence all its utterances, while also of course erasing its inscribers and silencing its utterers. we can do more. we are americans. we dream big. we have at our disposal the most insanely destructive military machine the world has ever known. we can fly to the moon or annihilate the world with the touch of a button. we will bring every bit of our know-how and derangement to the fight to destroy the word 'nigger' itself and all its components. 'nigger' is this generation's moonshot, this generation's hiroshima, a fallujah of our very own. if we do not undertake this, our destiny, historians and white suprematists and hip hop artists, drawn by 'nigger''s dread aura, might always come upon it lying around somewhere, apparently by chance. like a ring of power, such things have a way of not staying lost.
admittedly, the word 'nigger' is a purely abstract object, which is why its evil both permeates the universe down to its itsybitsyest hadron and appears nowhere within it at all. sadly, lobbing it into a volcano has no effect on it whatsoever. to destroy the word 'nigger', we're going to need new interdimensional quantum beam weapons that can be deployed against the abstract realm, which is where our real enemies are concealed, like osama in abottabad. the cowards! maybe we can work out a un inspections regime, just to be sure they're not enriching concepts to weapons grade up there. nothing is off the table. or, indeed, on it.
one thing that's super-wrong: the phrase 'the n-word': it's just a euphemism for the word 'nigger', i tell you! and because the latter word is hedged about with mystical taboos and is so deeply offensive to so many, any expression that refers to that word shares in the intrinsic evil with which it smokes, which rises from it as healing power rises from the relics of the saints. i personally am at least as offended by 'the n-word' as by 'nigger.' really, i propose that they are synonymous (actually they are connected in a meta-referential stack on which preservation of synonymy at the meta-level is built in by stipulation: see below), and hence that if one is offensive, so is the other. if kids down at the high school aren't producing expressions such as 'yo, my n-word, what up?' then i miss my guess. and note that the letter 'n' is itself one sixth of the word 'nigger': that is one fifth too much.
imagine the possible uses of the phrase 'the n-word' in white suprematist discourse or in bullying on facebook! admittedly, calling people a word seems nonsensical. but it's all part of the dehumanization that goes with sounds and shapes of such a nature. when i hear 'the n-word', sometimes the word 'nigger' appears in my mind: i know what it is that they are referring to! that's when i get out the ice pick i keep by me for just such occasions and start stabbing myself in the head, trying to delete that word from my synapses. maybe we should try 'the word that begins with the letter that comes two after 'l''. no wait! that refers to the same word too. in everyday conversation, or when constructing my argument that 'that word' should be strictly prohibited (and i mean precisely what i say, that the phrase 'that word' should be banned, as well as any phrase that can be used to refer to the phrase 'that word,' such as 'the phrase 'that word''; along of course with any expression that refers to 'the phrase 'that word'', such as 'the phrase 'the phrase 'that word'''), i refer to it as 'the fifth word of line 14 on p. 242 of the 1902 harcourt edition of adventures of huckleberry finn', though i also hold that that phrase itself, as well of course as adventures of huckleberry finn, or indeed the 19th century as a whole, should be banned. wait just let me double-check that reference. ack! my eyes! you know what? this ice pick to the head thing is the only road to justice.
now on frege's view, the phrase 'the n-word' refers to the sense of the word 'nigger'. that sense is profoundly offensive or indeed the term itself is defined, for example in the dictionary, as offensive, and hence its sense is offensiveness itself: the very essence of offensiveness, like a precious 'nigger' perfume. hence we need a euphemism to pick out the phrase 'the n-word': possibly the phrase 'the t-phrase'. however, the reference of the phrase 'the t-phrase' is the phrase 'the n-word', which refers to the offensive sense of the word 'nigger'. we're going to need infinitely many layers of euphemisms for euphemisms for euphemisms to insulate ourselves from the Word of Evil itself, and then we are going to have to ban all those layers. eventually, this will entail banning the use of language entirely. so be it. any given word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, book, literary period, conversation, and so on, is likely to offend. it's inappropriate. i often offend even myself with my own internal monologue, as you might imagine.