John McWhorter

John McWhorter teaches linguistics, American studies and music history at Columbia and writes a weekly column for The New York Times. Nine Nasty Words, published in 2021, takes nine English obscenities and follows the history of each, and what emerges is that the category of the unsayable keeps moving: once it was religion, then the body, and now it is language that demeans a group of people. He treats the material as a historian of language rather than as a scold. His academic work is on creole languages and on how languages change, and he has published more than twenty books, among them Woke Racism in the same year, which argues that a strand of American antiracism functions like a religion and which drew heavy argument in return.