Cotton-Picking Minutes, Minds and Hands

Racist Language can lie hidden in plain sight.

Many years ago, when I was a smoker of non-tobacco substances, I had a pipe that was gradually getting clogged up with resins and ashes. At first, I had no idea how to make that pipe usable again. I thought carefully to myself “I need something long thin and rigid, so that it can be pushed down the stem of the pipe, but not so rigid that it can’t be bent to the curvature of the pipe. And it needs to be covered with cloth, so that it can scrub out the goo. Do we have anything in the house like that?” I finally realized there was only one thing that would do the job: The pipe-cleaners that my Mom had saved from Cub Scout scrap-craft projects when she was a Den Mother. We had used them for making stick figure men in dioramas. They were Eskimos when they were set up next to egg-shell igloos, and cowboys when they were perched on plastic horses. But this was the first time in my life that I realized they were actually designed for cleaning pipes.

Until then, I had never realized that pipe-cleaner was a compound word, and not a name of a category. Names only have parts which are not themselves words. If you divide the word “pipe” into parts you only get letters, which don’t refer to any objects in the world. But when you call something a pipe cleaner, you are not just giving it a name, you are describing what the thing does. Our language is full of compound words which are actually descriptions, but we often think of them as simple words, and…