"It’s as much a war movie as anything else, with a woman as the general, and her gender isn’t the chink in her armor."

Wrote Frank Bruni, in the NYT last October, in "Sigourney Weaver Goes Her Own Way/Delivering performances both profound and eccentric, the actress has refused to be pinned down or defined throughout her nearly half-century career. At 71, she’s still going her own (mischievous) way." 

There were 9 other articles with the word "chink" in The New York Times in 2020. Today, the NYT's delightful word puzzle "Spelling Bee" challenges us to make words out of these letters....

... and it rejects the word "chink." If you try to enter it, you'll be told "Not in word list." 

I wasn't surprised to see this. I'd long observed the Spelling Bee's rejection of the word "coon," which can be a racial slur but, obviously, is also what people who call an opossum a "possum" call a raccoon. Last November, I blogged (at great length) about the Spelling Bee's rejection of the word "nappy."

The reason I'm blogging about this issue again, with "chink," is that the NYT printed the word "chink" 20 times in its own articles in 2020! When is a bad word so bad it's censored when it appears in a non-bad context? Take a position.

You know what? I took a position back in 2012. ESPN had fired a reporter for using the phrase "chink in the armor" in a headline that was about a Chinese basketball player. I felt sorry for the reporter, who'd used "chink in the armor" many times before and didn't mean to crack a joke about the player's race, but I wrote:

[L]et me say something cold-hearted: This is what happens when you use clichés. George Orwell told you long ago — in "Politics and the English Language": "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print." Not only did you use one, your defense — other than that Christian business — is that you've used that same tired old figure of speech over and over and over again.

A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed...

... and chink in the armor.

Nobody even wears armor anymore, and the word "chink" is only used — other than in its moronic racial denotation — in that dying metaphor. Here's my rule: No one should ever use the expression "chink in the armor" again. Fire everyone who lets it go out in a final draft of anything.

Why was the NYT using the word "chink" in 10 articles in 2020? Wait. Let me make the use/mention distinction. (We were talking about the use/mention distinction just yesterday.) The quote in the post headline above is a use of the word, and it's in the "chink in the armor" cliché. 

Here's the rest of the lot, in reverse chronological order. You can test yourself to identify what is a use and what is a mention, and you can also check my assertion that the only use of "chink" other than "in its moronic racial denotation" is in the phrase "chink in the armor."

1. "It’s not just older people who have abnormally high levels of inflammation, or chinks in their immunological armor." 

2. "There’s a section toward the end when you think she might be about to offer a glimmer of hope, a chink of light, but you turn the page and the darkness rises again, cold as the North Sea." 

3. From "The Slur I Never Expected to Hear in 2020/As an Asian-American, I’ve been conditioned to a certain kind of unspoken racism. This pandemic has unmasked how vicious it really is": "As he was leaving the elevator, he said, 'Don’t bring that Chink virus here.'... I never would have thought that the word 'Chink' would have a resurgence in 2020."... 'I don’t open the doors for Chinks!' he yelled.... Another friend, a nurse, was called a 'dirty Chink' by her patient, who had Covid-19." 

4. "'Run on before I have you lynched,' the man says. Looking straight at Sam. 'Run on, you filthy. Little. Chink.'" 

5. "'To me it’s very short sighted,' Dmitri Trenin, the director of the Moscow Carnegie Center, said of the former Soviet leaders’ minimizing the epidemic. 'If you say, "Well, we are an island in a stormy sea and that is because of me," then you’ve cloaked yourself in armor that doesn’t allow a single chink. If there is one chink, your credibility goes down."'" 

6. "In 'On a Certain Blindness,' [William] James describes the trip: '... The impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. [A settler family] had then built a log cabin, plastering its chinks with clay....'" 

7. "The cancellation of the Royal Opera performances were the latest indication of a chink in [Placido] Domingo’s European armor." 

8. "And yet my behavior still strikes me as practical, the only way to ensure that, in life’s arena, no chink in the armor will be exposed to another gladiator’s spear." 

9. "Knobby whelks, scotch bonnets, Queen Helmet conchs — the shells, once hard exoskeletons for soft-bodied sea creatures, were chinked with tide-tumbled battle scars."

##3 and 4 are mentions of "chink," and in both, the meaning is the moronic racial use. (Side note: Is "moronic" doomed?!) All the rest, including the one about Sigourney Weaver, are uses of the word. 

The "chink in the armor" cliché dominates, but I'm proven wrong in my assertion that it's the only non-racial usage these days. "Chink" is used outside of the armor context in ##2, 6, and 9. 

##2 and 6 are relatively fresh, straining toward the poetic. So I'm proven wrong, and it will do no good for me to argue that #6 doesn't count because it's in a quote from long ago — 1899, to be exact:

In 1899, the year after his trip to San Francisco, William James published his “Talks to Teachers and Students,” a series of lectures.... When it was published, William highlighted one lecture for special consideration, a talk entitled “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” (Today, we’d think again about the author’s use of the word blindness, which associates the physical state of blindness with ignorance.)

And there's another censorship topic, blindness. But I'll stop now.

NOTE: If the NYT followed the rule I (satirically) announced back in 2012, it would have fired Frank Bruni.