knsnsus

Semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics… These are all aspects that Gloria Naylor deals with in her essay “MOMMY, WHAT DOES ‘NIGGER’ MEAN?” Questioning meaning and concluding that it is nothing (or something else, something unknown) beyond consensus makes one wonder if the set of definitions we come across on a daily basis is only valid within a particular context. She favors oral communication for its suprasegmental aspects and their involvement in the conveyance of meaning; an inflection, a pause, an intonation in a specific situation, may be more engaged with the actual meaning of the message than the words themselves. However, the importance of context is emphasized and with it the idea of audience, intended reader, actual reader and even reception theory may come to mind. It is the choice the word user makes and the exposure to such constructions in the ongoing situation that will be responsible for the effectiveness of communication, focusing particularly on the decoding process. Contemporary writers are compelled to take these aspects into account, whether intuitively or conscientiously to succeed in their task of getting their message across.

Among the aspects that determine meaning, gender, race and social status are highlighted in Naylor’s discussion, as she points out that her factory, laundry and shipyard working family would use the word “nigger” in different situations and with different meaning. As she was called a “nigger” when she was in the third grade, gender had been most predominant, since she had never heard the word addressed to a female ever before, finally that being what confused her and made her feel somehow insulted, sparking her curiosity into finally asking her mother about the meaning of the word. This confusion is a consequence of the multiple meaning interpretation possibilities that a text, be it spoken or written, may have. The relevance of such possibilities for anyone who is interested in contemporary writing lies on the fact that a text may be decoded in multiple levels and the mastering of conveying a cohesive message in all of these levels is what will utterly make the author’s work effective.