From The Washington Post
When is a word a slur? One linguist argues Big Data can help tell
By Frances Stead Sellers
The evolving controversy over the Washington NFL team’s name has prompted several local news organizations — the Washington City Paper, Slate, Capital News Service, the New Republic and The Post’s editorial board, among them — to stop using the term “Redskins.”...
Last June, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board ruled in the Native Americans’ favor, stripping the team of federal protections for six of its trademarks....
These days, the language debate is taking place on a new playing field though, according to Geoffrey Nunberg, the pro bono linguistics expert for the Native Americans. Not because public opinion has changed (that shouldn’t affect how linguists assess 1967 usage), but because linguistic science has changed.
In the 1990s, when Nunberg signed up to work on the issue, he used “the kind of evidence that lexicographers rely on when they’re compiling dictionaries” to figure out how people used the term “redskins” back in the late ’60s and what they said about it. Now, with tools such as Google Books and the Google N-gram tool, linguists can bring big data to bear on such questions of historic usage and meaning
Being able to pull “humungous amounts of data” has given him “a better understanding” of how the word was used, says Nunberg, an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information and regular contributor to NPR’s Fresh Air.....