Getting a pass

Recently I watched a public-service ad, filmed many years ago, in which Barbra Streisand uses the word retarded. The word was in the name of the organization she was promoting at the time. Today, of course, that word is verboten. Comics are permitted to say any four-letter word they can think of, but they better not say that word. Nor can anyone else say it without getting a negative reaction. Crippled is another such word. There are many other words that were once in common use but cannot now be said in polite company.

I heard someone say, only half in jest, that everyone should get a pass on any words that were in common use before they turned 30. I believe it was the novelist Walter Kirn who said that. In other words, if you could say the word retarded before you were 30 without repercussions, you should be able to say it when you are 60. It's hard work for older people to keep up with the fast-moving trends in language. Should they be required to?

Perhaps Joe Biden should get a pass when he uses words like boy and colored when talking about black people. (Today most people write Black people, but the word was lower case when I was under 30 and I don't plan to change.) Actually, being a prominent Democrat, Biden does get a pass, but Donald Trump, of a comparable age, would certainly not if he used those words.

Most of us can probably remember being embarrassed by something our parents or grandparents said. Either a) they used words that were no longer considered polite or b) they used youth slang they were too old to use. My father, hardly a racist, nevertheless used the n-word from time to time. I wanted to hide. Fortunately he never tried out youth slang.

In a way, using slang from a younger generation may be the bigger offense. In his book Word Play, Peter Farb writes that the very purpose of slang is to exclude people. Only those on the inside know what the words actually mean. Only they should be allowed to use them. Older people don't get a pass when they try to use the slang of younger people. They just sound foolish.

At the same time, older people should get a pass to go on using the slang they mastered as teenagers.