The Bias Against Spoken Language

by Chris Bodenner

Linguist John McWhorter jumps into the historical record and finds that the ironic, in-group use of "nigger" is nothing new:

The reason one might feel that one has been hearing the black use of the N-word "lately" is because one has heard rap only "lately," and because only "lately" has there been a regular string of black stand-up comedy shows on television and black comedy films. Before all this, the same stuff was going on, just unrecorded – i.e. in spoken language, always...