-Caveat Lector-
~~for educational purposes~~
Corruption of language
by Walter E. Williams
MANY OF MY YOUTHFUL Saturday afternoons were spent at the
theater watching Tarzan or Jungle Jim fighting in the swamps
and jungles against the forces of evil. There were swamps
and jungles because we saw them.
When have you last heard the words swamps and jungles? Have
swamps and jungles disappeared from the face of the earth?
No, for political purposes they've been renamed. They're now
wetlands and rain forests. The public can't be whipped into
a frenzy about saving swamps and jungles, but wetlands and
rain forests are a different matter. Everybody's onboard with
the new terminology except the military. They're still calling
combat dress clothing jungle camouflage. They should rename
their combat dress rain forest camouflage.
Years ago, there were bums, vagabonds, tramps and hobos. They,
too, have disappeared. Now we have homeless people. That causes
temporary confusion. When a person asks me, "Will you help the
homeless?" I don't know whether I'm being asked to assist someone
whose home was lost in a tornado, flood or hurricane, or a
shiftless bum. Use of homeless is the leftist agenda to establish
moral equivalency between tragedy that's an act of God and
self-inflicted tragedy.
There's another term confusing to me -- care-giver. If someone
said, "I saw the girl walking down the street with her care-giver,"
with whom would you think she was walking? It might be her mother,
father, babysitter, seeing-eye dog, doctor, lawyer, policeman,
hairdresser -- the possibilities are endless. So why cause confusion?
Just say, "She was walking with her father."
Just as confusing is the classification native American. Whenever
I have to fill out a form that has a block where one can classify
himself as a "Native American," I always check that block and urge
you to do so too if you were born in the United States. The
African-American classification poses problems, too. What if a
person of Afrikaner or Egyptian ancestry were born in the United
States. Would he be an African-American?
On many of America's college campuses, there are courses such as
"Violence and Gender" and "Gender Inequality."
Sustained, intransigent, ignorance might be excusable elsewhere but
not on a college campus. Gender is a grammatical term: "the
classification by which nouns and pronouns (and often accompanying
modifiers) are grouped or inflected." For example, in French, "le"
is the article for the masculine gender and "la" the article for the
feminine gender. Gender and sex are two different concepts. They
are not interchangeable. Plus, it would sound funny to say, "He
had gender with his wife."
Aside from ignorance, college professors can be silly, too. What
used to be the position of department chairman is now the sexually
neutral department chair. I hold such a position at George Mason
University and refuse to identify myself as Chair. On occasions,
when referred to as a chair, I've offered to prove to the speaker
that I am a chairman.
Sticking with the college scene a little more, presidents pretend
to assume the moral high ground by pointing to the importance they
place on campus diversity. Whatever they mean by diversity, they
darn sure don't mean political diversity. Most colleges are leftist
bastions. Very often 90 percent or more of their faculty and
administrators are Democrats. What presidents really mean by
diversity is that they are for race and sex quotas, but not
political quotas.
John Milton predicted, "When language in common use in any country
becomes irregular and depraved, it is followed by their ruin and
degradation."
Just in case you're puzzled by our national moral decline.
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