Derogatory term: Wog

Question answered by lutefisk in Scientology

FredricRice asked this question on 9/5/2000:

I've run across Robert A. Heinlein's use of the term "Wog" in his book, "The Number of the Beast." I know that L. Ron Hubbard hated "Chinks" as he called them, and that the Scientology cult uses the derogatory term for anyone who hasn't been suckered into the cult.

Did Hubbard get the term from Heinlein? Or was the racist term merely one od many used in Hubbard's time and Hubbard -- and his insane cult -- merely adopt the use of the term?

Thanks.

lutefisk gave this response on 9/9/2000:

There are two possible etymologies for the word Hubbard used. One is the British meaning, which is more or less synonymous with "n***er" - it's not certain where it comes from but it may be derived from "golliwog" (as in the doll). The other is the American word "pollywog", meaning tadpole. The same word is (or at least used to be) Naval slang for a new recruit and, by extension, a clueless person.

There's not much doubt that Hubbard was deeply racist - he was an open supporter of South Africa's apartheid regime in the early 1960s - but he doesn't appear to have used "wog" in a racial context.

The earliest use that I've been able to find of it is in a 1952 lecture, "Creative Admiration Processing" (given 10 January 1953), in which he says: "You'll find out most people, wog people have mock-ups which are two-dimensional" In other lectures he uses other derivations - "woggle [him] up", "feeling woggy", "he woggle-woggled me", "they wog him ... he begins to feel sort of megalomanic", "woggiest "people]", "that's all viewed with a worm's-eye view of the wog ... if you ask a wog these questions, you've had it, because he can never answer this question."

So it appears that (as with many other words, such as "auditing") Hubbard took an existing word - in this case probably the Navy slang word - and gave it a unique Scientological spin. It essentially means an "aberrated person" (and by extension a non-Scientologist) and I've seen it used as a pejorative on more than one occasion. The fact that it's also a deeply offensive racist epithet is very unfortunate for Scientology, but they're stuck with it, as it's part of the Sacred Word of Ron.

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