Stan K-Bootle: "It’s
vital to know that Goll[i/y]wog (the doll and the name) is considered
racist to many Anglophones. And Wog even more so, in the same taboo class
as the N-word. Context: child-speak doggy-woggy Of course PC (Politically
Correct) fashions vary confusedly over space, time and languages. Even sensitive
novelists like Nabokov can be caught retrospectively ‘out-of-phase,’ as it were.
He regularly uses Negro where Black or African-American
have become more ‘acceptable.’ ..."
JM: There is a gigantic difference between
employing incorrect words and exhibiting incorrect attitudes. I
don't think that Nabokov ever made a slip in relation to the latter
(there's no "violence" nor "brutality" in him), even though his words might
have sounded politically incorrect, at least according to a transient
verbal fashion.
We must keep in mind that it's Shade speaking through
the Kinbote filter, but here is a paragraph that is worth
reproducing:
"Shade said that more than anything on earth he loathed
Vulgarity and Brutality, and that one found these two ideally united in racial
prejudice...the tears of all ill-treated human beings, throughout the
hopelessness of all time..., As a dealer in old and new words (observed Shade)
he strongly objected to that epithet ["colored"] not only because it was
artistically misleading, but also because its sense depended too much upon
application and applier." ( this is an excerpt and not the
full commentary which is worth reading again in its
entirety).