Fresh Air

Richard Pryor’s daughter Elizabeth is a scholar of the N-word

The word has two distinct pronunciations, she says, which signal entirely different meanings. The hard 'er' ending, she says, has historically been used as a weapon — a way of saying you are less than human. The soft 'a' ending, she says, is used within the Black community as a term of familiarity and even affection.

Fresh Air

Richard Pryor’s daughter Elizabeth is a scholar of the N-word

The word is doing a tremendous amount of work in American culture and society, and it's a problem that causes real harm to people. And one of the ways that we can actually address that problem with more than hand-wringing or more than shock is to actually understand how it works.

Fresh Air

Richard Pryor’s daughter Elizabeth is a scholar of the N-word

It's the most volatile word in the American language. It has been used to harm, to bond, to challenge, to unite, to separate. It's impossible to discuss American history, literature, and culture without it.

Fresh Air

Richard Pryor’s daughter Elizabeth is a scholar of the N-word

The word is doing a tremendous amount of work — it's marking race, it's marking power, it's marking intimacy, it's marking hatred, it's marking love. And what's extraordinary about it is that it can mark all those things simultaneously.

It's Been a Minute

What if the ‘biological clock’ is a scam? | It's Been A Minute

I think that we've enshrined a lot of cultural assumptions about women and their reproductive capacity in the terms for their organs and terms for things happening in pregnancy and their reproductive decisions, I guess. It's like a really messed up form of metonymy where the organ, like the incompetent cervix, the hostile or geriatric uterus, is standing in for how our culture is stereotyping women.

TBPN

The Great Peptide Debate with Martin Shkreli & Max Marchione

Isn't there a problem when we have to redefine semantics that have been defined forever? Isn't this like somebody saying, you know, I'm using, you know, GPT instead of using AI or something like that? Like, there's a specific meaning, like peptide has this very specific meaning, and they're not new. They're 80 years old, people have been using peptides forever.