Our common nature is a musical journey with Yo-Yo Ma and me, Anna Gonzalez, through this complicated country.

We go into caves, onto boats, and up mountain trails to meet people, hear their stories, and of course, play some music, all to reconnect to nature.

Listen to Our Common Nature from WNYC, wherever you get podcasts.

A heads up, y'all.

We are talking about slurs in this episode, so you may hear some offensive terms.

All right.

On to the show.

What's good?

You're listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR.

I'm Gene Demby.

So you know, if you rock with those on Code Switch, that we are a bunch of, like, true

blue word nerds.

The name of our show comes from sociolinguistics, and a lot of our beat ends up being about

language, you know, because language is political, it's about power and the ability

to define ourselves and blah, blah, blah, blah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's all fine and important,

but I mean, come on, so much of language is just fun, right? Like, it even comes with a frisson

of danger. Ferson, noun, a brief moment of emotional excitement.

You probably remember being a kid in sneaking to look up bad, no-no words in the dictionary.

We see you.

You ain't slick.

The internet has made that kind of semantic snooping so much easier, and it's also giving the folks at the dictionary a bunch of data about what people look up to boot, including slurs.

And apparently based on that data, one of Merriam Webster's most looked up words on their site is the N-word.

...