The N Word on South Park
From SusoSight
I heard yesterday about how South Park had an episode on the use of the N word. You can see the beginning of that episode here.Without having seen the whole episode and hearing it described, I can say that I can understand what the message was. Sometimes you have to be very blunt to get a message across, and Trey and Matt seem to do it properly.
A few things that I found interesting, first of all, do a search for the word naggers on dictionary.com and check what it suggests.
Secondly, the guy who told me about the episode explained it this way: "the final puzzle was 'People who annoy you' and the letters that were given where N (blank) G G E R S.". Now when I heard it explained this way I immediately thought of the N word. I am a native speaker of English who was born in America. Interestingly enough, when I gave the same explaination of the episode to my wife who speaks English nearly perfectly but is not a native speaker and was not raised in America, she thought of the word 'naggers', which was the answer to the puzzle in the episode. I was surprised to hear her think of the right answer so quickly because I know that she is aware of the N word, but it didn't strike her as that immediately until I told her what Kyle's dad in the episode answered. I felt somewhat ashamed that I thought of it immediately, but when I thought about it a bit, it made me realize how ingrained in the minds of Americans the N word is and how we all try to hide it.
I just thought I'd approach this issue from a different angle than the one others will beat to death.
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