Son Of a...

NYC word police are back in action.

The New York City Council, which drew national headlines when it passed a symbolic citywide ban earlier this year on the use of the so-called n-word, has turned its linguistic (and legislative) lance toward a different slur: bitch.

The term is hateful and deeply sexist, said Councilwoman Darlene Mealy of Brooklyn, who has introduced a measure against the word, saying it creates “a paradigm of shame and indignity” for all women.

The bill would also ban use of the word "ho" within city limits.  How cosmopolitan!

Opponents are squarely missing the point, arguing the merits and alternative meanings of these words.

“Half my conversation would be gone,” said Michael Musto, the Village Voice columnist, whom a reporter encountered on his bicycle on Sunday night on the corner of Seventh Avenue South and Christopher Street. Mr. Musto, widely known for his coverage of celebrity gossip, dismissed the idea as absurd.

“On the downtown club scene,” he said, munching on an apple, the two terms are often used as terms of endearment. “We divest any negative implication from the word and toss it around with love.”

Darris James, 31, an architect from Brooklyn who was outside the Duplex, a piano bar in the West Village, on Sunday night was similarly opposed. “Hell, if I can’t say bitch, I wouldn’t be able to call half my friends.”

Proponents are - somwhat stupefyingly - stupefied by the opposition, off-the-mark as it may be.

They may not have been the kinds of reaction that Ms. Mealy, a Detroit-born former transit worker serving her first term, was expecting. “They buried the n-word, but what about the other words that really affect women, such as ‘b,’ and ‘ho’? That’s a vile attack on our womanhood,” Ms. Mealy said in a telephone interview.“

Maybe.  But it's not government's job to stop verbal attacks on womanhood, no matter how vile.  Attempts to do so constitute a vile attack on individual liberties.

Happily, as with the n-word ban, this bill would be utterly pointless, in that it can't be enforced.  But pointlessness doesn't imply meaninglessness.  A symbolic trouncing of the right to free speech in its most literal, vocalized form, is just comically misguided.

Ms. Mealy acknowledged that the measure was unenforceable, but she argued that it would carry symbolic power against the pejorative uses of the word. Even so, a number of New Yorkers said they were taken aback by the idea of prohibiting a term that they not only use, but do so with relish and affection.

Good thing this city doesn't have any actual problems for lawmakers to worry about.

Previously:
Nannyism In New York (a Regrettably Continuing Series)
Nannyism Backfires
New York's Runaway Banwagon
iNanny
New York Loves the N-Word
Nannyism Is the New Black
Nannyism in New York