CAUTION: This post contains a word that many people find offensive. Because the point of this post is to examine society’s contradictory and confusing attitudes toward the word, I’ve decided to use the word—and to warn you that you will see the word throughout the post.

It’s the “n” word. Nigger. The abbreviated version appears in most recent news articles about a decision by a publishing company to reissue two Mark Twain literary classics and to replace every instance of “nigger” with “slave.”

This Publishers Weekly Online news article uses the word nigger and explains why Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to combine versions of “Huckleberry Finn” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” in a volume that replaces the “n” word with the word “slave.”

The announcement already is causing debate among purists who decry changing Mark Twain’s writing, and “social purists” who find the word nigger offensive. According to the Publishers Weekly article, some teachers want to include Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer in their classes, but are concerned about offending students and parents because of the “n” word.

I’ve rarely used the word nigger as a racial epithet—I WANT to say that I’ve never used it that way, but I probably have, at some point in my life. My current view of it was molded in the early 1980s while watching the movie, “Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip.” Until then, I had laughed and laughed at Pryor’s comedy–which had included a seemingly endless supply of expletives and epithets, including “nigger.”

But I was deeply moved as Pryor talked about a trip he took to Africa in 1979. He said that he was changed after seeing millions of Africans, any of whom could have been his relative or neighbor if it had been in the United States, living as “regular people.” They weren’t “niggers”; they were people, he said. Pryor swore he would never again use the word “nigger” in his stand-up comedy routines, and I also vowed that day never to use the word as a racial epithet.

But that doesn’t mean that I, or you for that matter, should be conflicted or contradictory over whether the word should remain in our literature, music, or everyday conversations.

An interesting point that I learned while researching this post. In 1998, Pryor won the first Mark Twain Prize for American Humor from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Wikipedia quotes former Kennedy Center President Lawrence J. Wilker as saying:

Pryor forced us to look at the social question of race. Twain forced us to look at the social question of race.

What about rappers?

It’s not my favorite music genre—by a long shot. But I have a teenaged son who has fought for years to be able to load explicit rap songs on his iPod. It used to only take one utterance of the word nigger on a song for me to make him delete the song, or at least stop playing it in my presence. But what I prevented when he was 15 is not as easy to avoid now that he is 17. Anyway, I think he gets perverse satisfaction out of making his dad squirm. I know that I did when I was his age.

I know a guy who has recorded rap songs. I downloaded his latest project onto my iPod and gave it a listen. Along with the usual themes of sex, violence and drugs, the lyrics were coated with liberal doses of the word nigger. I wondered why a black artist would want to use this derogatory word…so I asked him.

I probably sounded like the 50-something white suburbanite that I’ve become:

When he didn’t respond immediately, I started to worry that I had breeched some secret racial social barrier that was supposed to keep us from talking about this sensitive topic. Keep white people from understanding some deep pain—or its antidote—that is only shared among black people.

It turned out that he was only waiting for break time to respond. Silly me!

“Nigger,” “Nigga,” “Slave.”

Words have their specific meanings, and a remarkable author like Samuel Clemens (a.k.a., Mark Twain) knew the subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle differences.

What was good enough for Mark Twain is good enough for me. If my teenaged son can hear a rapper singing about his “nigga posse,” my son should be able to read the word “nigger” in “Huck Finn” and “Tom Sawyer.” I don’t want to offend people, and if anyone in my son’s class would object to the word, use it as a way to link the past with the present. Talk about what it meant to be a “nigger” in the late 1800s. Talk about why people think it’s acceptable or not acceptable to use the word today. That would be educational.

I believe that Mark Twain, if he were still alive, probably would be heartened that we understood what he was trying to say…and to some degree, what he was trying to stop.

I recently shared with you that I don’t find much credibility in the generalizations being spread about distinct and universal differences in employees based on their “generation.” I just don’t see an automatic one-to-one relationship between the year someone was born and the person’s approach to the working world.

My 15-1/2 year old son, Kevin, has been regularly confirming for me that at least one of those stereotypes isn’t true: Teens are not becoming socially inept due to a huge reliance on communications tools such as social networks, texting and lots of time spent gaming online.

One nice example: Kevin (pictured here batting) made a real-life connection with a gaming friend during a baseball game today. As we drove home from his game (which his team won), Kevin described to me how it transpired.

For some time, Kev has been playing “Gears of War” online with several high school friends, and other people he has “met” online. One of the gamers he met was a sophomore at the same high school that Kevin attends. Kevin soon learned the gamer’s first name and that he was of Pakistani heritage.

During the game today, one of Kevin’s teammates mentioned that he knew a sophomore on the other team, and he stated his name. The name of the Pakastani ball player was the same as the gamer’s. Kevin wondered whether it was just a coincidence.

An inning later, Kevin was playing third base and the Pakastani ball player advanced to third. Kevin decided to ask the ball player whether he played Gears of War. When the player said that he did, Kevin asked whether his gamer tag was the one that Kevin knew. Sure enough, it was the same person.

The two of them smiled and made some small talk, and now have a connection that they otherwise wouldn’t have made if two things hadn’t occurred:

• Kevin needed to be social during his online gaming time (which he and his friends are, in general).
• Kevin had to be social in person, asking a stranger a question that might make Kevin feel or look foolish. Isn’t that what we do during networking sessions in the “adult” world?

My point is that the tools that some adults say are making our kids socially inept actually, in some cases, are making it easier for our kids to be social with their peers.

I’ve attended many conference sessions and training courses during the past few years that tried to explain the significance of generational differences in the workplace, and why Baby Boomers like me were going to have to adjust our thinking and actions as “Gen Yers” begin to work alongside us.

The topic has become so overworked, in my opinion, that last September, I nearly skipped the Keynote Session at the Melcrum Strategic Communication Management Summit in Chicago. All I saw was its title: “Unlocking Gen Y’s Loyalty, Creativity, and Performance.” “Not again,” I thought. After all, I had just participated in a training course at work on the topic of generations in the workforce, and the presenters at a pre-conference workshop at the 2008 Melcrum “Summit” event in Chicago had included the same discussion as part of their session.

What else could I possibly learn?

It turned out that I could learn a lot, and am very glad that I decided to stay at the Keynote Session. The speaker was Jason Ryan Dorsey, author of books including “Graduate to Your Perfect Job” and “My Reality Check Bounced.” Dorsey is funny, well-spoken and in-touch with the latest generation to enter the workforce because he is a member of Gen Y. In fact, I learned a couple of things about Gen Y that I want to share with you, and you can learn more by visiting Jason’s website.

First, don’t believe anyone who tells you that you can instantly tell everything about a group of employees simply based on their birth dates. That’s too much like Horoscopes, and most of us know to keep a skeptical eye on something that is generalized to such an extreme.

Jason will tell you that. He pointed out to the Melcrum Summit audience how Gen Yers are said to be technically savvy–after all, they were handed laptops right after their first pacifiers, and latched onto text messaging long before they completed DARE training in middle school. Yet, the reality is that someone who knows how to operate a device such as a mobile phone and its texting option is not necessarily a technical savant.

“Usually on the first day of a new job, some Baby Boomer comes up to us and says that he couldn’t figure out how to hook up the PC to the printer, but he figured that we would know how to do it,” Dorsey said. “Well, we have no clue, but we can look at the pictures in the user manual and try to figure it out.”

Another generalization about Gen Y that Dorsey discussed was the lenth of time they are willing to wait until deciding to leave a particular job. Whereas the World War II generation expected to be at the same job for an entire career, and Baby Boomers typically gave a new job 1-2 years before deciding to move on, “Gen Yers know by lunch whether we’re going to come back the next day,” Dorsey said.

Well, I’ve hired and worked with people from a range of generations who held that same attitude. And a little thing we call the “economic meltdown” probably has skewed that job-hopping statistic a bit.

Age isn’t the only measuring stick, and it isn’t one of the more reliable, in my opinion.