Here's the straight skinny.

Paul came up with the idea for pseudodictionary. He's the originator. Paul's creativity, hard work, and cash made this site possible. Garret does the programming. These guys are the brains of pseudodictionary.com.

Paul got too busy to keep up with submittals in June, 2001. He asked for someone to help edit. I volunteered. Paul looked over my curriculum vitae and decided to sign me up. He gave me access to the back end of the site. I'm the editor. OK, I'm an editor.

I don't remember seeing colored people come in. I either completely missed it, went brain dead and marked the wrong selection, or someone else accepted it. Would I have intentionally allowed it in myself? Not a chance. I can't imagine a context where I would have accepted it. We have to destroy any vestiges of the real racism that continues to exist. So, yes, I would have censored it had I caught it. However, people I've known could have used the term or accepted it with the best of intentions.

Let me give you a bit of my background. That way you'll know something about the editor when you submit a word or when you send an email. I'm kind of old. Not at all a bushy-tailed young whippersnapper like Paul and Garret. I know people my age who have grandchildren older than Paul and Garret. That makes me ancient to most pd submitters. To others I'm a living fossil.

I grew up in Arkansas in the 1940s and 1950s. But I don't think I saw a Whites Only or Colored Only sign until I was at least 17 years old. There's a lot of difference between my home in the hill country of Northwest Arkansas and the delta of East Arkansas. Except for one Filipino woman, everyone who lived within 30 or 40 miles of where I grew up was a WASP, a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Yes, we were segregated -- long before my friends and I were born. We weren't even aware of it.

I suppose there might even have been a Ku Klux Klan presence in the county a generation or two before I was born, but we never heard anything about it. The only divisiveness we saw was Methodist vs Baptist, town kid vs country kid, hard-working student vs slacker, band student vs athlete, or something equally stupid. We did what people have always done and will always do: We made fun of people who were different from us. We lived the Kris Kristofferson song lyric: Everyone's got to have someone to look down on . . . to feel good about herself. Even bums. They can look down on zombies.

We weren't often exposed to the stupidity of racism. We rarely recognized what little racism we saw. When we saw it in the movies, we didn't even know that the black roles were racist stereotypes. We never saw any live blacks, so what did we know? That it was racism simply didn't register with us. We did hear the n-word from time to time. In some of the crude jokes of the day. We didn't particularly think of that as wrong, or even think that the jokes were racist. The white fool jokes had a Little Moron character. The black fool jokes a Rastus character. We weren't fools at all. Why should the color or race of the butt of the joke matter to us? The jokes we all hated were the ones that made fun of hillbillies. Because we knew city folks thought of us town folks as hillbillies and looked down on us. Since we were all one race, we didn't develop racial prejudices unless we heard it from our parents.

Public schools in Little Rock shut down for a year while I was in high school -- after Little Rock Central High was integrated. A student from Little Rock came to live with his grandparents. Danny went to school with us at least a full year. Even so, I never heard a single discussion at home or at school about race relations. Dollars to donut holes his parents were racist, but that never occurred to me until this very day. The only person I recall as being racist was my own father.

I spoke with my 85 year-old Aunt Frances today. She said there was no racist talk when she was growing up either. So my father must have picked it up from friends or after he moved away from home. I didn't live with my parents. I rarely even saw them. I didn't like my father. I didn't respect him. He embsarrassed me, much as the Dennis Hopper character in Hoosiers embarrassed his son. So I don't think he could have had any significant influence on my thinking in any area.

In those naive, olden, and unenlightened days, we thought colored and Negro were polite terms to use. My grandmother would have bullwhipped me if she thought I had disrespected anyone. I'm not sure we were sufficiently aware of the taboo of the n-word to avoid using it openly if we happened to see a Negro. We would certainly never have called anyone black. We would have thought that would be an insult.

We had the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People then, the NAACP. We have it today. Colored people was definitely an acceptable phrase then. But I don't use or accept it now. Blacks aren't black, anyway. Whites aren't white. We're all flesh-colored. Just different skin shades. Context may demand that I characterize the race of a Jamaican woman, racially descended from dark-skinned Africans. What word or phrase am I supposed to use? She's not American -- I know she's Jamaican. Referring to her as African-American would be incongruous.To keep from offending blacks, I may at some time in the future need help to avoid doing so unwittingly. Maybe I'm getting to be like the old dog that can't be taught new tricks, but it's at least a bit confusing that it's all right to say person of color but not all right to say colored person. Even though I've studied mathematics and logic extensively, that's a logic that's beyond me.

(A few days after drafting this message, I've concluded that I added colored person. I must have gone brain dead and clicked on add rather than del. Why that conclusion? Most of the entries come to me. I must have done it. Sorry for the error.)

A generic scenario -- this is not just, repeat, not just applicable to this colored people situation. Something acceptable to you at one time may turn into something unacceptable to you. It's not fair for you to blame me if I don't know that you've changed your mind. To be fair, you should tell me something along these lines, "I'm sorry. I forgot to tell you. I changed my mind about _____. I'm no longer in favor of _____. Here's why I changed my mind. . . . " Which brings me to how things happen at the pseudodictionary.

There's a tongue-in-cheek reference to our "ever-changing and somewhat arbitrary submittal guidelines" at www.pseudodictionary.com/pseudoctrinate. The guidelines really don't change very often. They don't change very much. But editors are fallible human beings with human idiosyncracies and inconsistencies. What appears acceptable at midnight Saturday might not seem acceptable in Monday morning's cold harsh light of day. What's more, your entry may be handled by one editor and rejected. If you resubmit the identical information later, another editor might accept it without change. We have no formal or organized vetting procedure here. Whoever sees an item first is going to be the one who handles it.

Censorship? No, just implementing our Quality Assurance function. When I examine a word that's been submitted, I apply the guidelines (the specifications, if you will) on the main page and on the submit page. With a significant exception: Once the site passed 8000 words or so, we started being more selective. That is to say, a word may satisfy all of the guidelines as published but still not be accepted. Why not? If I think a word will contribute nothing, I will reject it. The guidelines don't say anything about how much work an editor should put in to make an entry intelligible. Sometimes a word gets little more than a glance before I toss it. If there's no email address and no website -- and it looks as if it'll take a lot of work to fix it -- and especially if it looks as if the submitter put very little effort into it, or just seems to be just blowing off steam, or is inviting me to throw her word away. . . . OK, I'll gladly oblige and throw it away. Early on, Paul called me for adding comments to entries. Now he lets me call for conventional style in spelling, punctuation, capitalization, etc. It may be easier to use chat room style for keyboarding, but it's also lot more difficult for crochety old ladies and cranky old men to read.

Click this hyperlinkfor the current guidelines. They are slightly different from those in the front-end web pages. If you have complaints about "censorship" or about a word's being rejected, don't complain to Paul or Garret, email machiavellean by clicking here. If I'm not the right editor to handle your complaint, I can pass it along to Paul for him to find out who is.

If I get tired of listening to whining, I can just check out. It's a lot of work to be an editor for the pseudodictionary. It's also a lot of fun. My pay for doing the work is the fun. If it stops being fun, I stop doing the work. I don't own the ballpark; Paul does. But I can go home if I choose to.

machiavellean

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