This has been coming up a lot lately.

I've been involved in a lot of discussions lately about what's okay to make jokes about, and how to make jokes about sensitive subjects. Instead of that, I'm going to lecture you on why this South Park clip is wrong. You know, on the off chance that you needed an explanation. I'll come back to the video in a moment.

First off some background. Language is symbolic. It's important you know that. When you write "apple", none of the associated shapes actually produces an apple, it spells out a universally agreed upon symbol which conveys the image of an apple to anyone capable of reading or understanding that shape.

Generally.

If I were to say "I'm going to go digiscrub a bitcoin" you wouldn't have any idea what any of that means, because bitcoins are retarded. No, it's because "digiscrub" and "bitcoin" aren't generally in the universal lexicon of human speech. There's no shared understanding of what a digiscrub looks like or a bitcoin is (not between anyone worth talking to, anyway) so there's no understood meaning of what those symbols means.

Now, the images conjured by any one symbol is going to be different between people, which is the source of a lot of conflict. When I say "romantic night in", obviously what I'm picturing is vastly different than what my girlfriend might imagine. So when I show up with a tub of vegetable shortening and a length of garden hose, only to find her lighting candles and cooking a steak, conflict arises.

This is caused primarily by the fact that words have multiple meanings. If I were to call something "epic" you'd assume the Internet ate my brain, and you'd be right, or I could be talking about any story that beings with an invocation to the muses. Meaning can be divided into two groups, "connotation" and "denotation."

Denotation is the literal definition of the word. Look it up on a dictionary, and you'll find what the word denotes. That's what that means. Farting in a punchbowl denotes that people should not invite you to parties.

Connotation is the non-literal meanings and innuendo associated with those symbols. Wait, that's a terrible explanation, let me show you.







You see what I mean? Now please excuse me, I need to go molest a produce stand.




. . . Okay, I'm back. Innuendo and irony basically works entirely on the friction between what is said and what is meant. A lot of English-language humor is derived from the same.

Basically, the whole point of what I'm trying to say is that words have meaning, and meaning varies between the people you're conversing with. This is the point where I tie things together with the South Park video I linked earlier, if you haven't seen it yet, you should go watch it. It's pretty funny and not terribly long, either way.

The conflict in the episode derives from the contrast between what the boys use "fag" to denote, versus what the rest of society understands it to mean. To anyone who grew up in the 90s, this should start sounding mighty familiar.

I've seen less sultry looks in a Turkish bath-house.

Generally, I think people that use "fag" or "gay" as slang terminology for any unpleasant situation aren't homophobic. If that were the case, every American male under the age of 16 would be considered a raging homophobe.

. . . Okay, bad example, but you see what I mean. I don't think most folks come from a place of malice, basically.

The only problem is, a lot of people DO use those words maliciously, and when you're dealing with someone who doesn't know you, they're probably going to hedge their bets and assume that you're one of those people who uses those words to kill.

Now, there are a few different approaches we can take to deal with this sort of dichotomy. Here are a few:

1) Cry "Censorship!" at everyone who tries to cut down on the amount of casual hate speech society uses
2) Use your media empire to force a shift in the paradigm of language
3) Establish some sort of hand signal that lets people know you're using hate speech ironically

Of course if you want to get zany, you could not use hate speech. But that's just crazy talk.

South Park, and the people this episode is speaking to, have made a critical mistake in ignoring the fact that words have many meanings to many different people. I could spend the rest of this article talking about the controversies South Park knowingly instigates with their treatment of Jews and whatnot, but the basic issue here is that they're using words that bigots use, and then complaining when people accuse them of being bigots.

Guys, you don't wear a Klan hood and then complain when people call you racist. That's not how society works. There are thousands of words you can use to refer to jackasses, if you use the one that offends a group of people then it's not their fault that you've offended them, and they're not trying to censor you when they ask that you stop using hate speech. The First Amendment does not guarantee you protection from the fallout of your own words.

I'm not just talking about South Park, either. If you've ever ironically called someone a cock-gobbling fatty fat queermosexual at a party and had someone call you on your bullshit, "relax it was just a joke" is not a valid defense. Words have meaning.

If you're going to use risque language, then you need to accept the consequences of doing so. If you don't want people accusing you of bigotry, don't use bigoted language.

I look forward to your intelligent, well thought-out rebuttals in the comments section.