I consider myself politically progressive, but there are a few major sticking points that keep me perpetually at odds with my would-be allies. I hold in utter contempt anyone who would attempt to dictate to me a list of things I am forbidden to say, and it is generally more from the left than from other quarters that such dictation comes. I am part of that minority that continues to consider political correctness a real threat, and not a momentary excess of the early 1990s, when we heard all that reactionary huffing about how soon enough they'll be making us say 'vertically challenged' instead of 'short' and so on. I speak not with Rush Limbaugh but with Vladimir Nabokov when I say that I am horrified by the limitation of free expression, by which I don't mean the usual 'expression of unpopular ideas' beloved of 'card-carrying members of the ACLU', but rather the creative use of language where a Schillerian free play of the imagination is the only source of regulation. I believe the desire to regulate externally stems not just from a misunderstanding of how political progress is made, but also of how language functions.

When I write about this stuff, I know in advance I'm going to get a positive response from free-spirited avuncular types who to be perfectly honest are rather embarrassing to me, those 60-something men in Hawaiian shirts who remember when women liked to be complimented on their 'gams' and who are wary of that stuff they're teaching the kids in the colleges these days; and I know in advance I'm going to get silence from my peers. But what can I do? The principle of parrhesia cannot be grounded on prior calculations about who one would like to hang out with.

Once I had a phone call from a friend who was attending some soirée at the Mongolian embassy in Washington. "I'm surrounded by Mongols," she shouted. "Be careful," I replied. We laughed. This is not a hilarious joke, not even a joke at all, but if we were to try to figure out what the cause of the laughter was, it would be undeniable that the answer lies in the particular connotative charge of that ethnonym, a charge that is rooted, ultimately, in prejudice and xenophobia. I see images from Tarkovsky of the Mongol invasions of Russia, rude horsemen pouring boiling tar down the throats of devout Christians (incidentally, in the very same film we see the greatest depiction I can think of of the fate of jesters, and the most profound, most quintessentially Russian expression of the essential interwovenness of humor, sorrow, and brutality; see the video clip above). I imagine, moreover, that part of the ineliminable force of the word 'Mongol' arises from the later, and now archaic, accretion of sense that came with the use of the term, with the suffix '-oid' not just as a racial category, but also as a quasi-medical term for people with chromosomal disorders.

Incidents like this leave me thinking: how much of the mental encyclopedia of culture and history that I've spent the past 40 years acquiring would I have to have scooped out of my head in order for the words I know to stop being polysemous in this way, to lose the charge of potential offensiveness that constrains me to use them with caution, even as I exercise my mastery over them by directing that charge to just the right effect?