“Would you say … ‘We/I just need to work the kinks out’ if you knew that sentiment was rooted in racism. Kinky hair is beautiful. Natural hair is powerful,” reads one.

(source: National Review Online | Print)

I honestly try to spend as little time as possible venting grievances against the perpetually aggrieved.  Two main reasons for this are that, in many cases, the heat of controversy generates more trouble than the fad-of-the-moment; there is just no reason to spend a lot of effort picking needles off a cactus (better to figure out whether the cactus needs healing, transplanting, or replacing).  And also, to be frank, a lot of the awkward and obnoxious bureaucratic nonsense that grows over these issues is a response to what are very real misunderstandings and sufferings for a lot of people, people on either “side” of whatever the issue seems to be.

Along with that, of course, I do think it’s important to avoid giving offense whenever possible.  It shouldn’t need saying, but–well, here we are.

But once in a while, it just gets to be too much.  The sheer ignorance passing as knowledge, overlaid on the sheer unwillingness to pass on real knowledge, erupts into high-visibility folly that we shouldn’t pass without comment.

So, at the risk of being pedantic, let me indulge in a bit of quite literal pedantry.

To “work the kinks out” is in no sense racist.

It’s colorably true that the adjective “kinky” became associated with “hair” during the worst phase of American racism, and it would be prudent to avoid associating “kinky” with “hair” as a racial characteristic in any situation where “kinky” might be seen to take on a negative charge (and don’t even come close to this professionally offensive personality’s usage).

But beyond that, it is sheer balderdash and hooey to pretend that the noun “kink,” in its prominent 17C sense (most likely from Dutch) of “a bend or twist, as in a cord,” overlaid on a sound pattern already part of English from its Germanic/Scandinavian roots (the spelling is more Norse than Anglo-Saxon), is derived from or primarily about a particular kind of hair–or has a negative charge that follows from a negative assessment of that hair type.

(By the way, this kind of “borrowed meaning on top of an existing cognate” thing happens with some very common words:  “shirt” and “skirt,” for instance, meant the same garment draped from the shoulders and covering torso and hips 1500 years ago, when “scirt” was Old English and “skirt” was Old Norse; when “scirt” specialized in English to mean “garment descending from the shoulders,” the Danish gave us “skirt” for “open garment wrapped around the hips.”)

Let me illustrate with some less-precise-than-charts-make-it-look examples:

My point here being nothing more than that the word’s usage is easily attested in a wide variety of forms, and that “kinky” does not predominate among them.  As anyone who knows English well would expect, the noun sense “kink” formed from the verb “to kink” has become dominant, while “kinky” is used in a wide variety of derivative senses.

More to the point, though, one need not spend too long looking at the character of the attestations to discover that “work the kinks out” is hardly a phrase that originally or predominantly referred to combing out tightly curled hair.  A look at the attestations for the phrase “kink in the brain” helps to bear this out; it is just one more iteration of the very basic notion that one’s train of thought, or one’s nerve or muscle fibers, or the “threads” that we pull and the “tangled web we weave” can become knotted, twisted, depraved, tangled, kinked, bent, twisted, warped (itself a weaving reference), etc. etc.

One last not-so-much-scientific-as-technically-nifty rhetorical device:

You can readily see how the adjectives that can be applied to a particular kind of hair have varied.  “Nappy” (the word almost certain to cause offense, as it has narrowed in American usage) declines as “kinky” comes into use; to the extent “kinky” is about hair and not about “geeky” problem-solving (late 19C & early 20C, before “hacking” replaced “kinking”) or sexual perversity (from early/mid 20C), “kinky” is the less-obviously-offensive word for “nappy”; and note the rise of “frizzy,” which is the word you’ll see in the shampoo aisle. 

Yes, I do think every kind of hair can be beautiful.  And I also think some people might not want their hair to be “frizzy” in certain humidity, or “kinky” when it’s been under a hat.  Far more important, though, the word “kink” has a much larger semantic domain than these hair words.  It requires serious ignorance of language and history not to understand that.

Folks who think that “work the kinks out” is racist need, well, a vacation.

To, y’know, work the kinks out.