Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/ghostwriter
[Forgive me, I’m still working on transcribing some of the French and clips Rough Translation used.]
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, play a duet with language on a giant floor piano.
Here at the Allusionist, I’m often asked, “Is this term racist?” about words like ‘picnic’, which we learned in the 2015 bonus episode does not have racist etymology. I think we should steer clear of inventing racial origins for terms because there are already so many that DO have them. Bulldozer, tipping point, grandfathering, selling down the river, gypped, cakewalk, peanut gallery… and the French word for ‘ghostwriter’. I was fascinated to hear an investigation of this term on the NPR podcast Rough Translation, and they have very kindly allowed me to play their piece for you now.
Content note: the piece is about, and therefore contains, offensive terms. And towards the end of the episode, in the Minillusionist, I get into the etymology of a term with a racist violent history.
OK, here’s ‘We Don’t Say That’, from NPR’s Rough Translation, reported by Ngofeen Mputubwele and Gregory Warner, who also hosts the show.
MPUTUBWELE: First thing - can I get you to introduce yourself?
NELLY BUFFON: OK. I'm Nelly Buffon, and I was working as a journalist for 13 years.
WARNER: What does Nelly look like, by the way?
MPUTUBWELE: She looks like a nice teacher - maybe, like, art teacher. Oh, yeah, Miss Buffon. I love her.
BUFFON: It's strange because, as a mixed-race person, you feel that you are 50-50. But here in France, I know that for white people in front of me, I'm not black. When I refer to myself as a black person, they said, oh, come on, you're not so black. If you don't have your hair natural, we won't even find out that you have black blood. It's strange.
MPUTUBWELE: Yeah.
BUFFON: It's really, really strange.
MPUTUBWELE: Yeah.
Like a lot of journalists, Nelly has an inner novelist.
BUFFON: I wanted to write books, to write novel.
MPUTUBWELE: So she writes up a manuscript and sends it off to publishers and gets a resounding no.
BUFFON: I felt frustrated because I wanted somebody to tell me what I have to do to do it better.
MPUTUBWELE: Nelly's looking around, and there's not a lot of these things we're used to having in the U.S., like books on writing or MFA programs.
BUFFON: No blogs, no websites - no, no, no. Everybody thinks that writing cannot be learned here in France.
MPUTUBWELE: Hm. OK.
BUFFON: It's something like, you have the gift, or you don't have it.
MPUTUBWELE: And so Nelly says, I'm going to start this consulting agency where I can help people learn how to write, like, connect them with people who can help, like, maybe an editor or a ghostwriter.
Are there many black-owned...
BUFFON: No, I'm always alone. I've always been alone. I'm always the only black person.
MPUTUBWELE: One day, pretty soon after she starts this new literary consulting agency, she's at a press conference hosted by the Ministry of Culture.
BUFFON: I remember exactly the place. We were in the temple of French literature, the Centre National du Livre.
MPUTUBWELE: Imagine a fancy salon lined with books.
BUFFON: And this woman asked me this question - (speaking French).
MPUTUBWELE: What this white woman asked Nelly was, “Do you offer nigger services?” That's the literal translation.
BUFFON: And that was really shocking, and I was, like, having my heart squeezing and my brain totally freezing for some seconds. And I was like, am I supposed to punch her?
MPUTUBWELE: Nelly knows this is the word for ghostwriter.
BUFFON: Everybody knows that word in France.
MPUTUBWELE: But it's one thing to know that word, and it's another to hear it said to you.
BUFFON: And you are just shocked, and you are a lot of...
MPUTUBWELE: It's like she's the only one hearing how painful that word is.
BUFFON: You feel just really confused.
MPUTUBWELE: The word negre - it can mean - like, can translate as negro. But after talking to black and white people in France, when it's used today, it's much more like our N-word in the U.S.
WARNER: So how did that word come to mean ghostwriter?
MPUTUBWELE: Negre was the word used to describe black people during slavery. Like, it's funny; like, France is really proud of the fact that slavery was illegal in France, but if you cross the Atlantic and landed in the New World, places like Haiti or Guadalupe - which is where Nelly's family is from - or Louisiana, that's where France enslaved black people, in its colonies. They were the negre. So negre came to mean ghostwriter because a negre is the person who's doing all this work and not receiving any of the benefits of that labor. The most famous example that's kind of been carried down through history to us is with Alexandre Dumas.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ACTOR #1: Alexandre Dumas (speaking French).
MPUTUBWELE: Dumas is one of France's most famous writers.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ACTOR #1: (speaking French)
MPUTUBWELE: They actually made this film about Dumas and one of his ghostwriters.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ACTOR #2: (speaking French)
MPUTUBWELE: You'll remember from, like, the French literary world, writing is a gift. It's like this - (singing) ahhh (ph).
WARNER: That's right.
MPUTUBWELE: And so this great mind is actually using ghostwriters.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ACTOR #3: (speaking French)
MPUTUBWELE: Dumas was mixed. His grandmother was black. So you know, the guy who wrote Three Musketeers is a black man from France, for the record.
WARNER: And the ghostwriters he hired were white.
MPUTUBWELE: Yeah, his ghostwriters were white. And so they started making fun of him.
LOUIS-GEORGES TIN: People would say he exploits them.
MPUTUBWELE: Louis-Georges Tin founded the best-known black organization in France.
TIN: People would laugh at him, calling him le negre. So le negre has - the nigger has niggers.
MPUTUBWELE: The thing is, you - like, it's an ordinary word that you can use whenever the word ghostwriter comes up. But back in the Centre National du Livre, that white crowd is not going to have the same relationship with this word as Nelly does.
BUFFON: When I came back home, I was talking with my husband about that. And I decided that I have to have a prepared answer if this came again.
MPUTUBWELE: Nelly wants people to stop using the word, but she also has a business to run and clients to get.
BUFFON: And it was like (speaking French). That means, yes, I see what you mean, but we don't use this term.
MPUTUBWELE: She decides to use the English word, ghostwriter - ‘ghostwriter’.
BUFFON: And I'm always saying that with a big, big, big smile.
WARNER: And what is she trying to do in those moments?
MPUTUBWELE: She's trying to get white people to hear that word in the same way she's hearing it.
WARNER: She's not just correcting their words; she's saying, did you hear what you just said?
MPUTUBWELE: Yeah. For years, Nelly keeps correcting people. And then one day, she's venting about all this at a friend's place.
BUFFON: We were in Brittany, and we were drinking a lot.
MPUTUBWELE: The friend works for Greenpeace.
BUFFON: And at Greenpeace, they used to launch a petition for every single thing they do. And she told me, but why don't you launch a petition about that?
MPUTUBWELE: But what Nelly's up against - wanting to change a French word - is a big deal because, in France, language is a matter of national identity. It's considered the foundation stone for the feeling of belonging to a community - that's not my words; that's the government's words. There's a council, set up hundreds of years ago, to guard the language. They're called l'Academie Française. There's 40 members known as the immortals. They dress in these, like, embroidered boleros and meet in a cathedral.
WARNER: What do they do there?
MPUTUBWELE: So they write the French dictionary.
WARNER: Wow.
MPUTUBWELE: Nelly addresses her petition to them, but the gears of the immortals turns slowly. So she also sends it to this other group, and they, too, protect the language, but they're more like a rapid response team. They meet, not in a cathedral, but in this ordinary government building. The name of the group is the General Delegation to the French Language and the Languages of France.
WARNER: Do they have an acronym or anything?
MPUTUBWELE: DGLFLF.
WARNER: Wait - DGLFLF? Can we just - can we deal with this?
MPUTUBWELE: Yeah. The linguists I talked to call them the DGLF.
WARNER: OK.
MPUTUBWELE: So that's what we're going to call them - DGLF. Their job is to identify any specialized terms, like all these English words that get created all the time - like smart home, net neutrality, freemium, downcycling, podcasting - and help Frenchify them.
GILLES SIOUFFI: (speaking French)
MPUTUBWELE: Gilles Siouffi is a linguist at The Sorbonne. And he gave me this example - infox. It is a mixture of information, which is information or news, and intoxication, which is, like - in French, is, like, poisoning. So, like, poisoning news.
SIOUFFI: (speaking French) fake news.
MPUTUBWELE: Oh. Once the DGLF says, OK, please don't say fake news anymore - say infox - the government has to start using that word. That's now the proper French term.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (speaking French).
MPUTUBWELE: So Nelly goes home, and she crafts this petition and argues why this word should be changed. And part of that argument is that:
BUFFON: We are supposed to be the people who are really caring about the words.
MPUTUBWELE: We the people who work in the craft of words, we should be careful with our words.
BUFFON: Please care about the words when you are talking to me, and care about this word especially.
MPUTUBWELE: She sends the petition around, waits for people to sign on. And she gets...
BUFFON: Thousand and 500.
MPUTUBWELE: 1,500 signatures - not nearly enough. And one of her friends is like, you should call Louis-Georges Tin.
TIN: I was contacted by a French citizen.
MPUTUBWELE: Louis-Georges - you'll remember - he's the founder of that prominent black organization in France, the Representative Council of Black Associations. And their acronym in French is CRAN.
TIN: Le CRAN.
MPUTUBWELE: CRAN.
TIN: Yes.
MPUTUBWELE: Louis-Georges remembers the day he got Nelly's call.
TIN: And she told me this funny and shocking story about people coming to her office asking for niggers. So that's funny, but that's revolting at the same time. And I told her, you did what you had to do. But because you are an isolated citizen, of course you didn't have all this success.
MPUTUBWELE: When all of this started, Nelly just wanted people to stop saying the N-word to her. She wasn't trying to be an activist or anything.
BUFFON: At the first beginning, I was not comfortable with the idea of contacting the CRAN because they have an image of angry black people. You know what I mean? And I really didn't want to do anything with anger.
TIN: She told me that she had tried before, and the petition didn't work.
MPUTUBWELE: And so Louis-Georges, he uses his connections to send the petition to thousands and thousands of people. Do you remember seeing the numbers ticking up, like, going up? Or...
BUFFON: Yeah. Yeah. I remember I was at home going to my computer every 15 minutes. And I was like, no - oh. Plus thousand and plus thousand and plus thousand. It was quite magical.
MPUTUBWELE: It looks like they may actually get a meeting with the DGLF. But there's another problem.
TIN: Ghostwriters.
MPUTUBWELE: The word Nelly's been using is the English word, ghostwriter.
TIN: Which is the American way.
MPUTUBWELE: But you can't go into the Delegation General a la Langue Francaise et aux Langues de France - which is just, like, too many references to French in the name - and be like, hey, can we use this English word? Can we say, le ghostwriter? No. Louis-Georges was like, you know what? There's actually a word in French for ghostwriter.
TIN: We have a word for that...
MPUTUBWELE: Before negre.
TIN: ...Which is ‘plume’.
MPUTUBWELE: Plume is feather or pen, like a fountain pen. ‘Prete-plume’ is loaned feather.
TIN: We want to go back to a very, very classical way, an elegant way of saying, which is nice. And it's less racist.
MPUTUBWELE: The first time I talked to Louis-Georges on the phone, he said something like, if you're a minority, and you want to see change happen, you can't be an idiot. You have to be strategic. And this is one of those moments where I see exactly what he meant.
When this petition gets hate mail, it's going to be criticized for changing tradition, changing the French language. And so what they do is they're like, oh, you want to be traditional? We're going to be even more traditional, even more truly French. And the petition gets them this meeting. They go to the DGLF, take the steps up to this ordinary administrative government office. And they meet with a wizard.
WARNER: He's like a court clerk.
MPUTUBWELE: Yeah. He's, like, the - he's like a clerk. I like to call him a wizard.
BUFFON: I found him friendly.
MPUTUBWELE: The fact that Nelly and Louis-Georges are even sitting in this office discussing this at all is pretty extraordinary. They don't have to respond to some petition from an ordinary citizen.
TIN: And they tell you, we - we'll call you next week, of course. Don't worry.
BUFFON: It's going to the Ministry cabinet.
TIN: Next week comes. There is no phone call.
BUFFON: It's going back to the College.
TIN: You need to call them every week to say, what's happening? Are you working on the issue? It's one month. Why is it so long?
MPUTUBWELE: Finally, Louis-Georges gets word that they're going to issue the recommendation. So I'm going to read the recommendation - (reading, speaking French). So in French dictionaries, the word negre, which is associated with slavery, employed to designate a person of color, is described as being pejorative, racist and antiquated.
WARNER: Wow. Pejorative, racist and antiquated. It's like, that's the coffin right there.
MPUTUBWELE: We, after having convened and considered - we propose this new term, prete-plume. And that's the win. And they send out the alert.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (speaking French)
MPUTUBWELE: Nelly and Louis-Georges go on TV.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TIN: (Speaking French).
BUFFON: (speaking French)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (speaking French)
BUFFON: Now when people are using this term in front of me, I just tell them that you know you're not allowed to tell that anymore.
MPUTUBWELE: She doesn't have to smile and choose her words carefully. She doesn't have to explain why that word is a problem. She just holds up this paper. We don't say that anymore.
BUFFON: I don't know. I'm always thinking about my ancestors who were slaves. And I'm always thinking that, at a moment, there were people who decided we wouldn't be slaves anymore. And even if they will be killed five minutes later, they decided we don't want to be slave anymore. For me, it's so strong, I think there's nothing above. If they have been able to do that, I can do something as well.
CREDITS:
HZ: ‘We Don’t Say That’ from NPR’s Rough Translation was reported by Ngofeen Mputubwele and Gregory Warner, produced by Jess Jiang and edited by Marianne McCune.
Rough Translation has just started a new season called International School of Scandal, all about people making trouble to try to change the status quo. Subscribe on your podcast app of choice, and you can also find the show and transcripts at NPR.org. Follow the show on Twitter @Roughly.
And coming up in today’s Minillusionist: the etymology of bulldozer.
MINILLUSIONIST
The original bulldozers were not machines; they were people. They bulldozed not earth or rubble, but other people. Bulldozing was the violent suppression of Black voters. Bulldoze was the noun for the violence, and bulldozers the noun for the people dealing it out.
‘Bull doze’ sounds cute, a bull having a light nap; but don’t be misled, that Z was just a respelling of an S, bull dose, a bulldose was a beating, either giving someone a thrashing fit for a bull, or a dose of the bullwhip, a whip severe enough to be felt by a bull, or a whip made of bovine leather - the exact whys of this word we can’t confirm, but we have a clearer idea of when and what for. 1876, Hayes vs Tilden, perhaps the USA’s most contested messy election, not a record I’m looking forward to being broken.
Some documents I’ve read from the time say the bulldozing was by Democrats to ensure they won the Southern states by preventing Black voters there from voting Republican, others that it was white Republicans bulldozing Black Democrats to force them either to join Republican societies or leave the state. I can’t confirm who, but what is clear is that bulldozing was brutal coercion and intimidation.
The violence and force lent the word to other things with those qualities; 1877, the year after the election, there was a pistol known as the bulldozer; and bulldozer became slang for a bully or vigilante without the specificity of the suppression of Black voters. But that sense of force sent the word in the direction of its current meaning; by 1889 bulldozers were machines used for bending metal in manufacturing, and then the early 20th century a bulldozer was the blade used for scraping stuff out of the way attached to a vehicle, initially a boat or mules. By the 1920s, you get tractors fitted with those bulldozer blades and the whole contraption became known as bulldozer, as they are still today.
But we could call them by another term that doesn’t have white supremacy in the etymology, like ‘earth movers’ say, because when alternatives exist, why use the option that is a casual reference to beatings and even murders that took place as systemic racial disenfranchisement that continues to play out a century and a half later?
It’s not erasing history to stop using this word; it’s still there, still documented, it doesn’t disappear if we remove the monuments. However, this word meaning an earth-moving vehicle did erase its history as a people-harming person. That became a metaphor, and the metaphor let us forget the reality; but the harm did stay real, in 1876 and right up to the present.
We have choices. Every time we use a word, it’s a choice. Societal inequality litters the English language but where we know about it, we can choose not to keep reiterating it.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
gloze, verb, archaic: 1. make excuses for; 2. use ingratiating or fawning language; 3. make a comment or comments.
Try using ‘gloze’ in an email today.
Thanks again to NPR’s Rough Translation for letting me play you their work, and to Lu Olkowski and Nicole Beemsterboer for their help. The Allusionist music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com. I first learned about bulldozer from the Patreon mailout from the website etymonline.com, and it’s an essential site if you’re interested in word history, I use it every day
Seek out @allusionistshow on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and for all the episodes, transcripts, tranquillusionists, randomly selected words, visit the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
