| Looking in detail at words that
“treat people as things, and things as people, and do so at
that strange
space where joking, ridiculing, demeaning, oppressing, resisting, and
regretting
converge,” Household Words is a study of
how certain words act as
indices of political and social change, perpetuating anxieties and
prejudices
even as those ways of thinking have been seemingly resolved or overcome
by history.
Specifically, Stephanie A. Smith
examines six words—bloomer, sucker, bombshell, scab, nigger,
and cyber—and
explores how these words with their contemporary
“universal” meaning appeal
to a dangerous idea about what it means to be human, an idea that
denies
our history of conflict. She traces “bombshell”
from Marilyn Monroe through
women’s liberation and the sexual revolution to Monica
Lewinsky, “scab”
from blemish to strikebreaker, “sucker” from
lollipop to the routinely
cheated. Exposing the ambiguities in each of the words, Smith reveals
that
our language is communal and cutting, democratic and discriminatory,
social
and psychological.
|
Household Words
Bloomers, Sucker,
Bombshell, Scab, Nigger, Cyber
by Stephanie Smith
University of Minnesota
Press, 2006
Order
a copy.
|
