The forcefully argued letter includes some incorrect assumptions about how the story was prepared. An editor did, in fact, look up the word mulatto in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.

But the e-mail does raise important questions about deciding which words fall into a pit of mutated language – terms that were once common but which have evolved into something now unacceptably insulting.

MULATTO AND MULE

There is virtual consensus on the origins of mulatto. Most lexicographers believe it comes from Spanish and Portuguese words for mule, which in turn are based on the Latin term for the same animal, mulus. The word was first used about 400 years ago to label children who had one black (African) and one white (European) parent. A mule, of course, is the offspring of a horse and a donkey.

A few people think that mulatto actually springs from the Arabic word muwallad (“a person of mixed race”), and may be related to walada ( “to give birth to”). But most scholars doubt this. They point out that mulatto is almost certainly connected to Spain’s central role in the Atlantic slave trade, and the desire to brand people based on the amount of white blood flowing through their veins. It’s not surprising that individuals who felt superior enough to buy and sell other human beings would latch on to such a slur.

The complaint sent to the CBC included an excerpt from an online dictionary (encarta.msn.com) that defined mulatto as “a taboo term for somebody who has one black and one Caucasian parent.” The e-mail suggests that anyone consulting a dictionary would be warned that the word is widely viewed as racist. It’s interesting to note, however, that the same Web site’s entry classified mulatto as “socially acceptable in the Caribbean Islands and other Latin American regions.”

Modern dictionaries are often seen as mirrors, reflecting how we use the language. They include colloquial expressions, vulgarity and jargon. Terms considered “derogatory” or “offensive” are often clearly marked. How is mulatto viewed in North America right now? Four dictionaries commonly used in our newsrooms – the Canadian Oxford, the Canadian Gage, Merriam-Webster’s, and the New Oxford – do not flag the word in any way. Whether a warning should be there, of course, is another matter.

MULATTO AND THE MEDIA

A CBC TV foreign correspondent used the word mulatto when reporting on the reburial of Dumas in Paris. He inadvertently added an extra l in his script. One of our writers in Toronto double-checked the spelling by looking at the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Although reference to “mule” was buried in the entry’s etymology, there was no mention of it in the main definition. There was also no warning about the possibility of mulatto being considered racist.

Reuters and some other news organizations also used the word in their Dumas coverage. Associated Press didn’t, but might have. Its 2000 stylebook merely advises journalists to avoid a capital “M” when writing mulatto because it’s not the proper name of a nationality or people – unlike, say, African or Caucasian. The 2002 Canadian Press Stylebook offers identical guidance. “Note that black, mulatto, red, yellow and white do not name races and are lowercase,” it says.

Capital letters, by the way, can be seen as a big deal in some contexts. The word Negro, for example, had a small “n” until a letter-writing campaign prompted the New York Times to change its policy in March 1930. All major publications in the United States and elsewhere gradually fell in line, notes Robert Burchfield, the former chief editor at the Oxford English Dictionary, in his 1989 book Unlocking the English Language. The word was eventually replaced by “black,” which the Times and many others now keep lowercase.

Mulatto shows up in countless stories written for various news outlets, from CNN and Time magazine to the Washington Post and several large Canadian newspapers and magazines. The New York Times used it repeatedly in a 1998 editorial about Thomas Jefferson, who “wrote the Declaration of Independence while enslaving others,” and who it turned out fathered a child with a mulatto slave “while maintaining that African-Americans were only marginally human and a threat to white racial integrity.”

The e-mail we received points out that the BBC online service didn’t use mulatto when reporting on Dumas. But a quick check reveals that the word is no stranger to the Web site’s news pages. It surfaced in a BBC article last summer about Haiti.

SHACKLED BY ETYMOLOGY

Some words should be and are avoided because they’re racist. As pointed out in a column on Siamese Twins, for instance, we would not use the term gypped for cheated because it originally referred to Gypsies. But other terms are not as easily tackled.

Last year, someone attacked the word Slav in one of our news stories, calling it an inappropriate term that was based on the Latin word for “captive” or slave (sclavus). Although it’s true that millions of people in Eastern Europe are probably known as “Slavic” in English because of a conquest more than a millennium ago, banning the word on these grounds would leave writers and editors rather tightly restrained.

Authorities also point out that Slavs subscribe to a much happier history of their name. According to this etymology, Slav comes from the Indo-European word “kleu,” which meant “to hear,” and refers to a famous, faithful people who understood one another. Slava, by extension, is a term from the Balkans that conveys the ideas of “honour” and “renown.”

If English speakers abandoned Slav and Slavic because of the ghost of slavery, what would we do about some other common words? Go hysterical? Hysteria, for example, has rather sexist roots. It was initially seen as a condition unique to women, which is why it’s founded on the Greek word for “uterus” (hustera). Today, however, the term is not limited to men or women, girls or boys. In fact it’s not even restricted to wild emotional fits. Something very amusing may be called “hysterical,” which reminds us that old words give birth to new meanings.

Then there’s language that merely sounds offensive to some. Niggardly, for instance, means “small, cheap or unkind.” It’s based on a Middle English word, nigon, which scholars believe is probably tied to the Scandinavian term for petty worrying or complaining, niggle. And getting something scot free has nothing to do with Scotland. In Old Norse, a scot was a type of tax. If we stopped using words like these because a few people might misinterpret them, caution would be hoisted to new heights. Under these conditions, the ass in assumption would stick out and might be forced to take a seat, along with some other perfectly harmless words.

THE ‘N’ WORD

Deciding whether a term is inappropriate requires much more than reviewing its etymology. A classic example is the intensely contemptuous noun and adjective “nigger,” which the 1998 New Oxford Dictionary of English defines as “one of the most racially offensive words in the language.”

Nigger is based on the French (negre) and Spanish (negro) words for “black” – both ultimately from Latin, niger. It has carried hurtful and hateful meaning since the 17th century, and still causes some people to squirm just reading or hearing it.

To insist that the word be suddenly embraced by all solely because the original meaning (“black”) is inoffensive would be farcical. To claim that any word with an unpleasant etymology, such as mulatto, should be automatically rejected because of its original meaning may be equally absurd.

There has been a recent campaign to give new currency to nigger by some members of the African-American community, but the argument is not based on etymology. In his 2002 book Nigger – The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, for instance, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy argues that the term should no longer be treated as taboo. Salvaging it, he says, would not only educate people about their past but also give them more power over their future:

"There is much to be gained by allowing people of all backgrounds to yank ‘nigger’ away from white supremacists, to subvert its ugliest denotation, and to convert the N-word from a negative into a positive appellation"

Prof. Randall Kennedy