An email arrived early last month from Lindsay Tucker, a former graduate student who is now an accomplished writer, editor, and podcaster.
“Did you write this?!” she asked, using both the question mark and exclamation point to expressively end her question. A screenshot from Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary definition of the word “jamoke” followed with this sample sentence attributed to me: “Why hasn’t anyone thought of inventing a laptop case that converts into a portable office so that when a jamoke like me is stuck in a joint like this, he can use the case as a portable work desk?”
It sure sounded like me, but I had no recollection of where I might have written it, so I had to search the sentence to find the source. Sure enough, it appeared in a “Road Warrior” column I’d written for “Inc.” magazine in December 1998, about a decade before Lindsay ever had to endure taking a course with me.
After I emailed Lindsay that those were indeed my words, I asked why she was asking. She responded that she was having a debate with Aviv Rubinstien, her co-host on her podcast “Lyrics for Lunch,” a podcast that explores the meanings of popular songs. It was “a plea really,” she writes, “for him to stop saying ‘jamoke’ on our show” because she felt like it was racist. It was then that Aviv quoted me to prove her wrong.
Jamoke is a slang word used pejoratively to describe someone as “inept” or “ordinary.” It’s sometimes interchangeable with the Yiddish word “schlub” which the earlier mentioned Merriam-Webster translates as “a stupid, worthless, or unattractive person.” In the article I wrote about the inability to find a laptop case that could be used as a good portable desk while stuck in the Detroit airport 23 years ago, I was using the word “jamoke” to describe myself.
To my knowledge, there are no racist connotations or derivations to the word. That doesn’t mean that the word couldn’t be used to make a racist comment. Most any word can be used to make a racist comment if the speaker is determined to use it that way.
Some who use the word “jamoke” or “schlub” do not intend either as the most uplifting of descriptors. Then again, often they are stand-ins for describing someone as an ordinary person as I did about myself in my column.
The right thing if you are uncomfortable with a word’s meaning is to look up the word as Aviv did or email the jamoke whose words Merriam-Webster used to show the word in action as Lindsay did. If you remain uncomfortable with the word, the best solution is not to use it even if it turns out to not have racist origins or not to mean what you thought it meant. One of the beauties of having a large vocabulary is the vast array of choices available to say something in a way that doesn’t make you uncomfortable to say it and avoids being offensive to whoever you’re saying it to.
In their podcast, which is a great listen, Lindsay and Aviv regularly butt heads but “in a playful way” she assures me. “He won this round, but he doesn’t win many,” she wrote, followed by a semicolon and parentheses to indicate a wink emoji. Lindsay and her expressive punctuation.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.
Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.
(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
No comments:
Post a Comment